What a custom website actually costs in 2026.
Most pages answering this question will not give you a number. Here are ours, what moves them, what you pay after launch, and how to read a quote that is hiding something.
The short answer.
A custom website for a small business in 2026 runs between $500 and $15,000. Most of that spread is not quality, it is who does the work and how they bill. A one-page portfolio and a five-location restaurant with online ordering both get quoted as “a website”.
Ours are published, which is rarer than it should be. Portfolio from $500, business site from $2,500, anything with an application behind it from $5,000. Hosting is $0 a month on all of them, so the number on the page is the number you pay.
What it costs, before you ask.
Four plans, four published prices, and free hosting on every one of them. Find the row that sounds like what you are building.
Prices start where they say they start: what moves them is scope, not who is asking. There is a fifth plan, Web Application, in development and not for sale yet. See all five side by side, with what each one includes.
What three years actually costs.
Three of these never stop billing. Two of them leave you owning nothing.
A DIY builder subscription
- Monthly plan from $16 to $159, forever
- Apps, domain, and business email cost extra
- You build it, you write it, you maintain it
~$1,300+
three years on a typical mid plan
A managed monthly website service
- Roughly $79 to $199 a month, usually with no build fee
- Cheaper than us in year one, past us before year three is out
- The site stays theirs: stop paying and it goes with them
$2,800 to $7,200
three years of payments, nothing owned at the end
A traditional agency
- $3,000 to $8,000 up front
- $99 to $499 a month for hosting and maintenance
- Four to eight weeks to launch
$6,500 to $15,000+
three years, build plus retainer
Alamo Digital Solutions, The Build
- One published project fee, custom code you own
- Hosting free for life, SSL included, your domain
- Live in about five days
$2,500
three years, total. Hosting included
What actually moves the price.
Five things, in the order they move a number.
How many pages, and how many of them are different
Five pages that share one layout is one design job. Five pages that each do something different is five. What gets quoted is usually the page count. What moves the price is how many distinct layouts are inside it.
Whether the words and the photographs exist yet
A site is quicker and cheaper to build when there is copy to lay out and photography to place. If both have to be written and sourced, that is real work, and it belongs in the quote rather than turning up later as a delay.
What it has to talk to
Booking, online ordering, payments, a CRM, an inventory feed. Linking to a system you already pay for is part of a standard build. Building that behaviour into the site itself is a different project, which is what the Custom tier is for.
How many locations, stylists, or service areas
One business with six locations is six sets of hours, six maps, and often six different menus or price lists. It is a bigger site, so it gets scoped as one. It is also the most common reason two quotes for “a restaurant website” land thousands apart.
Whether something already exists that has to move
Migrating an existing site means rebuilding the content, keeping the addresses that already rank, and switching a live domain without downtime. It is real work. Anyone who calls it free has not looked at your current site yet.
What a website costs after it is live.
Almost nobody puts this on a pricing page. Ours first, then what the same line costs elsewhere.
Hosting
$0 a month
Elsewhere, budget $10 to $50 a month on a shared plan, or $99 to $499 a month bundled into a maintenance retainer.
Your domain
$12 to $25 a year
Paid to a registrar, registered in your name. It is the one cost we do not touch, and nobody should be marking it up.
SSL certificate
Included
It should be included everywhere worth using in 2026. If it appears as a line item on a quote, ask what it is paying for.
Edits and blog posts
$0, you do them
Every site ships with a dashboard for your own words, images and posts. A brand new page is quoted before we start. If you would rather hand the edits off, Care is $200 a month and pays for people, never for hosting.
Replacing it
Not on any quote
The largest ongoing cost of a cheap website is buying a second one in two years, and it never appears on the first quote. It is the whole reason the cheapest number is rarely the smallest number.
Five things in a quote worth a second question.
None of these means somebody is dishonest. All of them mean a question you have not asked yet.
“Call for pricing.”
It is not a negotiating position, it is a sorting mechanism, and you are the one being sorted. Any business that can quote a starting price on the phone can publish it on a page.
“A free custom mockup.”
Design is the expensive part. Somebody giving it away is either not doing it, in which case it is a template with your logo dropped in, or charging for it somewhere you cannot see. Ours is a refundable deposit instead: $250 on a site build, $100 on a portfolio, credited to your total or returned in full.
No clear answer about who owns the code.
Ask it directly, and ask what happens to the site if you stop paying. If the answer runs longer than a sentence, you do not own it.
A number with no scope attached to it.
“$1,500 for a website” is a number, not a price. It becomes a price when it says how many pages, who writes them, what happens when you ask for a change, and what is not included.
A timeline with no dates in it.
“A few weeks” is what you are told when nobody has decided who is doing the work yet. Ask for the schedule, and ask what happens on each date in it.
The money questions, answered.
Why not pay a monthly fee somewhere and get everything included?
A monthly service is cheaper in year one and past us by year three, and you never own the site: stop paying and it goes with them. Ours is one price, code included, hosting free. Care at $200 a month is optional, and cancelling it costs you nothing you own.
What does free hosting actually mean?
Exactly what it says: $0 a month, SSL included, on your own domain. We built it ourselves, so it costs us almost nothing. The only monthly fee is Care, and Care pays for people. While we host it, your site carries a small "Powered by Alamo Digital Solutions" line at the foot of the page.
Ownership, builders, the $500 Portfolio and the five days are all answered on the plans page.
Then go and check the work.
A price is only worth reading next to what it buys. These are the builds and the process that produced them.
Our own published prices, or bands checked against published plan pricing and typical agency rates as of mid-2026. When one stops being true, this page changes. Ask for a real number for your own site, free, within 24 hours.