A five-page small business website sells for $2,500 at the two US agencies we found that publish a price: Nora Kramer Designs and Succeeding Small both list a five-page site at that figure. Both then charge every month: $89 at Nora Kramer Designs, and $75 or $175 at Succeeding Small. On Upwork, the median web designer charges $15 to $30 an hour. A business that builds its own site on Wix pays from $17 a month at the offer price showing on the day we looked.
So the honest answer has two parts: a build fee, and a monthly fee. The agencies that publish their prices charge both, and the monthly fee is the part that makes the business work.
How much should you charge for a small business website?
$2,500 for a five-page site is what two published agency price lists charge, plus $75 to $175 a month for hosting and care. Nora Kramer Designs lists five pages from $2,500, seven from $3,100 and ten from $4,000, each "+ $89/month for hosting & care plan". Succeeding Small lists its Starter Site at $2,500.
| Who | Build price | Monthly fee | What the build includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nora Kramer Designs, 5 pages | From $2,500 | $89 | Template-based WordPress and Divi design, 1 round of revisions |
| Nora Kramer Designs, 7 pages | From $3,100 | $89 | The same, with more pages |
| Nora Kramer Designs, 10 pages | From $4,000 | $89 | The same, with more pages |
| Succeeding Small, Starter Site | $2,500 | $75 or $175 | Five pages: Home, About, Services, Contact, Blog |
| Either agency, custom build | From $7,000 (Nora Kramer); "Price Varies" (Succeeding Small) | Not stated | Built from scratch |
Prices from each agency's own pricing page, 21 October 2026. Neither page prints a date.
Three of the five builds say "starting at", so they are floors. Nora Kramer Designs also says its prices assume "client supplying us with all text/body copy and images", so the client provides the words and pictures. Writing them costs extra: Succeeding Small lists "Website Copywriting — $900".
For a new web designer, that makes $2,500 for five template-based pages, with the client supplying the copy, a price with two published agencies standing behind it. Charging much less is possible, but it is a choice, not the market rate.
Want a monthly service to sell to the same local businesses? The AI Chatbot Agency walkthrough lays it out step by step, click by click.
What do agencies charge every month after the site is built?
$75 to $175 a month at the two agencies we checked. Nora Kramer Designs charges $89 a month for its hosting and care plan. Succeeding Small offers basic hosting and management at $75 a month, or a fuller plan at $175 a month that includes "30 minutes of monthly website edits".
What each monthly plan covers, from the agencies' own pages
- Nora Kramer Designs, $89 a month. Hosting, an SSL certificate, regular security scans, daily cloud backups, software updates and monthly reporting. The page says "The monthly fee is for your Hosting + Care Plan Service."
- Succeeding Small, Basic, $75 a month. Plugin and software updates, backups and security monitoring, and "Basic monthly edits and performance checks".
- Succeeding Small, $175 a month. Speed optimisation, uptime monitoring, accessibility checks and 30 minutes of edits each month.
The arithmetic shows why this matters. A $2,500 build with an $89 care plan brings in $3,568 in the first year and $1,068 every year after that, with no new sale. Ten clients on that plan bring in $10,680 a year before you build another site. How to start a web design business explains why a one-off build alone leaves most solo designers short.
How much do web designers charge per hour?
On Upwork the median is $15 to $30 an hour for web designers. Upwork's own guide gives $15 to $40+ for a basic one-page site, $20 to $50+ for CMS design such as WordPress, and $45 to $75+ for a full custom design. Nora Kramer Designs bills changes after launch at $149 an hour.
Upwork adds that clients "should expect anywhere from 10 hours for a very small design project to several dozen hours for a large-scale, custom design". At the median rate, 10 hours comes to $150 to $300. Its figures are worldwide, and the page says "This data represents typical hourly rate ranges of certain historical contracts worldwide."
The employed wage is the other benchmark. The BLS median for web developers was $44.54 an hour ($92,650 a year) in May 2025, and for web and digital interface designers $50.00 an hour ($104,000 a year). A self-employed designer has to charge more than that, because the rate also pays self-employment tax, which the IRS sets at 15.3%: "12.4% for social security (old-age, survivors, and disability insurance) and 2.9% for Medicare (hospital insurance)." It also has to cover the hours nobody pays for. Our free freelance hourly rate calculator works the rate out backwards from the income you need.
Should you charge per page or per project?
Per project, with a per-page price for extras. Both agencies price a set number of pages as one package: $2,500 for five pages. Nora Kramer Designs then charges $300 or more for each additional page, and lists add-ons such as a built-in blog at $350 and a Google Analytics setup at $150.
A package price is easier to sell than an hourly one. The client knows the total before work starts, and you are rewarded for getting faster, not punished for it. The per-page price stops a five-page job from turning into a twelve-page one at the same fee.
The other line both agencies draw is the copy. Nora Kramer Designs assumes the client sends the text and images. Succeeding Small sells copywriting separately at $900 and blog creation at $300. Saying who writes the words, in writing, before you quote, protects your price more than any other single line.
Why would a small business pay $2,500 when Wix costs $17 a month?
Because the $17 buys the tool, not the work. Wix showed its Light plan at $17 a month, Core at $29, Business at $39 and Business Elite at $159, and noted "Displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions, paid in full at the time of purchase." B12's Website plan is $24 a month. Either way, the owner still builds the site themselves.
Two things about those prices. The Wix page showed a time-limited offer, "Offer valid until Thursday 7:00 AM GMT", so the regular prices may be higher, and we could not see them. And Wix has a free plan at $0 a month, so a builder is never really the competition on price.
What the agency price buys is someone else doing the work: the layout, the pages, the forms, the hosting and the updates every month. Nora Kramer Designs makes the point on its own pricing page: "most business owners who try to DIY their website never finish it or aren’t happy with their results." That is the agency's view, not a measured fact, but it is the case every designer makes to every owner.
What does a website client actually earn you?
At the published prices, one client brings in $3,400 to $4,600 in the first year: $2,500 for the build, plus $75 to $175 a month. In year two, the same client brings in $900 to $2,100 for the monthly plan alone.
The arithmetic: $2,500 + (12 × $75) = $3,400, and $2,500 + (12 × $175) = $4,600. To match the BLS median web developer wage of $92,650 a year from builds alone, you would need about 37 five-page builds at $2,500 a year, which is about one every ten days. With 20 clients on a $175 monthly plan, the recurring part alone is $42,000 a year before you build another site.
That gap is why the monthly fee matters more than the build price. Builds have to be sold again every time. The care plan keeps paying for the same work. Finding the first business to say yes is in how to get your first client, and setting aside the tax as the money arrives is in side hustle tax explained.
How much does web design cost, according to agency surveys?
WebFX, a large agency, says "Web design costs $1,000 – $30,000+ in 2026 on average", from its own survey data. That range is so wide that it only tells you a small business site sits near the bottom of it, and five-page sites from the two agencies above are at $2,500.
We used only that headline. WebFX's table by business size puts enterprises with 501 or more employees at $2,501 to $5,000 a year and businesses with 251 to 500 employees at $100,000 to $150,000. Those two figures do not fit together, and the page does not explain why, so we did not rely on the table.
The honest hard part
The price is not the hard part. The hard part is that a small business owner can see Wix at $17 a month and does not easily see why your site is worth $2,500. Your quote has to show what they would otherwise do themselves, and what happens to the site after launch.
The second hard part is the monthly fee. A client keeps paying $89 or $175 a month only if the site keeps working and someone answers when they need a change. The price you can keep charging in year two depends on how reliable you were in year one.
The third is admitting what the published prices leave out. Two agencies is not the market. Most agencies quote only after a call, and local prices vary. Treat $2,500 for five pages as the visible part of the market, not all of it.
