A small business website costs one of four ways in 2026. A DIY builder like Wix or Squarespace runs $16 to $50 a month and you build it yourself. A freelancer charges $2,000 to $8,000 once. An agency charges $10,000 to $35,000 once. A done-for-you service like Mirin is $199 a month with the build, the hosting, and every edit included.
That is the honest answer most pricing pages bury under a thousand words of throat clearing.
The number you pay is not set by how many pages you need or how modern the template looks. It is set by one thing. Who does the work, and who keeps doing it after launch day.
Not sure your current site is worth keeping before you spend a dollar? Run it through the free Mirin scorecard. Sixty seconds, no signup.
Four ways to get a small business website
What a small business website should actually cost
Here are the four real options, with 2026 market rates, in one table.
Every number below links to a source you can check, not a sales figure.
| Option | Price | Who builds it | Who keeps it updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) | $16 to $50 per month | You | You, after hours |
| Freelancer | $2,000 to $8,000 one time | A hired designer | You, or pay again |
| Agency | $10,000 to $35,000 one time | A design team | You, or a retainer |
| Done-for-you (Mirin) | $199 per month | Mirin | Mirin, included |
Squarespace starts at $16 a month, and small business cost guides put the realistic DIY builder band at $15 to $50 a month before your time. That is the cheapest sticker price. It is also the option where you are the web designer now, on Sunday night, after the register is closed.
A freelancer for a simple five to ten page brochure site typically runs $2,000 to $8,000 one time, and a design agency for custom work runs $10,000 to $35,000. Both numbers buy you launch day. Neither one buys you the Tuesday six months later when your hours change.
What actually drives the price
The price is set by labor, not by pages.
A five page site and a nine page site cost almost the same to build. What moves the number is whether a human is designing, writing, and wiring your specific business, or whether you are doing that yourself inside a template. That is why the same brochure site can cost $16 a month or $16,000. The pixels are similar. The labor bill is not.
Three things push a quote up. Custom design instead of a template. Custom writing instead of filler. And functionality, like online booking, a store, or a member login, that has to be built and tested rather than switched on. If a quote is high, ask which of the three you are paying for. If it is low, ask which of the three you are now responsible for yourself.
What moves the number
Why the site pays for itself or costs you quietly
A website is not a brochure. It is the first impression most of your customers form before they ever call.
The Stanford Web Credibility Project, led by experimental psychologist B.J. Fogg, studied how people decide whether to trust an organization online. His finding was blunt. "The truth of the matter, and I didn't want to find this in the research but it's very clear, is that people do judge a website by how it looks," Fogg wrote in the lab's web credibility research, which found that roughly three in four people judge a company's credibility on design alone.
So the real question is not what a website costs. It is what a first time visitor decides in the few seconds they give you before they hit the back button.
Across the small business homepages we have rebuilt at Mirin this year, the change that moved calls was never a flashier design. It was putting the one thing the visitor came for, the hours, the service, the price, or the booking button, on the first screen. The site that makes people hunt for it reads as closed, no matter how much it cost.
See what your current site says to a first time visitor.
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The hidden cost nobody quotes: upkeep
The build price is the part everyone quotes. The upkeep is the part that actually decides which option was cheapest.
Every site has a running stack under it. Hosting, a domain, a security certificate, a form tool, a professional email address. Small business cost guides put ongoing maintenance alone at $600 to $2,400 a year once the site exists, before you change a word on it.
Then there is the upkeep no invoice shows. Your hours change for the season. You add a service, raise a price, run a promotion, or move locations. Every one of those is an edit. On a one time freelancer or agency build, that edit is either your evening or a fresh invoice, and the site slowly drifts out of date until it is quietly wrong.
So price the second year, not just launch day. A $6,000 agency site plus a year of small edits and subscriptions can quietly pass what the predictable monthly option costs, and the DIY builder is only cheap if the hour you spend fixing it on Sunday is worth nothing.
What you get for $199 a month
Done-for-you is the fourth option, and it is the one that folds the build, the hosting, and the upkeep into one predictable line.
For $199 a month, Mirin builds the site, hosts it, and makes the changes for you. You never open a dashboard after closing time.
You tell Mirin what changed in plain language. New hours, new service, new price, holiday closure. Mirin makes the edit, shows you a preview, and publishes it. No request queue you manage, no invoice per change. The math is simple. Two years of Mirin is about $4,800, which sits below a mid range agency build, except the edits are already included and there is no second year cliff.
It is not the cheapest sticker. It is often the cheapest real cost, because the upkeep is where the other three quietly bill you, in money or in evenings. See the full breakdown on Mirin pricing, or how the handled model works on the Mirin platform page.
How to pick the right number for you
Match the option to your honest capacity, not to the lowest price.
If you enjoy building things and have the evenings, a DIY builder is real money saved. If you want a designer's eye once and are happy to maintain the site yourself afterward, a freelancer is a fair trade. If you run a larger operation that needs custom systems and a team on retainer, an agency earns its quote.
But if you are an owner who wants a site that stays true without becoming a second job, the done-for-you line is usually the honest pick. Before any of that, make sure your current site is not already quietly turning customers away for reasons that cost nothing to fix. If it is a therapy or med spa practice, we have deeper cost breakdowns for a therapist website and a med spa website too.
See your business site rebuilt before you pay.
Send Mirin your current site. We will shape a preview around the one thing your customers actually came for, so you can compare the real thing to any quote.
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- We shape a preview
- You compare it to quotes
- You decide, live in days
The repeatable rule: price the second year, not just launch day. The right website cost is the one that keeps answering your customer's first question without borrowing your evenings to do it.
