What a website actually costs in Phoenix

Ask five people what a website costs and you will get five versions of "it depends." I understand why they say it. The honest answer really does depend on what you are building. But "it depends" is no help at all when you are trying to work out whether you can afford this yet, so here is what the market actually charges, what moves the price, and how I quote.

I do not publish a price list, and I want to be straight about why. Everything I make is custom. A website is designed and built from scratch, front end and back end, with no templates. A logo is drawn from scratch, never clipart. A five page site for a trade business and a site with a store and a booking system are different jobs, and one number for both would be wrong for one of them. So I quote each project after a short conversation, as one fixed figure, before any work starts. The quote is free. No credit card required.

What I quote

• Logo design. One-time.
• Websites. One-time.
• iOS and Android apps. One-time.
• Custom CRM or point of sale. One-time.
• Domains and hosting: monthly, scaled to traffic and storage.
• Local SEO: monthly, scaled to how many cities and services you want to rank for.

Every one of those is quoted on what the job actually takes. A five page site for a trade business is a small job. A site with a store, a booking system and eleven years of blog posts to migrate is not, and I will tell you that on the first call rather than in an invoice.

What the cheap end actually buys

There is a whole market below custom work and I am not going to pretend it is worthless, because sometimes it is the right call.

Squarespace or Wix, built by you: roughly $200 to $400 a year. If you are a brand new business and you genuinely do not know yet whether the thing sells, spending a weekend building your own site is a reasonable decision. I mean that. Do not pay for a custom build to prove demand you have not proven.

A $150 freelancer or an overseas shop: $150 to $800. You will get a site. What you usually will not get is anyone to call in eight months when the contact form quietly stops delivering. That is the actual risk, and it is not about skill or geography. It is that the relationship ends at launch.

Where the cheap end goes wrong is rarely the day it launches. It goes wrong later, and it tends to go wrong the same four ways:

• You cannot change anything without paying someone, so the site slowly goes out of date and stops matching what you actually sell.
• The template is running on forty other businesses, three of them your competitors in the same city.
• Nothing was ever measured, so nobody can tell you whether it worked.
• You do not own something you assumed you owned. Usually the domain.

None of those show up in the quote. All of them show up in the second year.

Where the money goes on a custom site

The part people picture is the design, and the design is maybe a third of it. The rest is the work that has no screenshot.

Working out what the business actually does. Not the services list. The reason people pick you over the other six results. This is a conversation, and it is the single biggest predictor of whether the site earns anything.

Writing it. Most quotes assume you will supply the copy. Most clients then do not, because writing about your own business is genuinely hard, and the project sits for five weeks. I write it. That is deliberately in the price, because a site that never launches has cost you everything and returned nothing.

The unglamorous half. Speed, so it loads on a phone on a job site with two bars. Testing on real devices rather than a browser window dragged narrow. On-page SEO, structured data, a sitemap Google can actually read. Analytics installed and verified to be reporting. Forms that arrive in your inbox instead of your spam folder. An SSL certificate that renews itself. Hosting that stays up in August.

That last group is where cheap sites are actually cheap. It is invisible on launch day, which is exactly why it is the first thing dropped.

What moves the price up

Four things, in roughly the order they show up:

1. Page count. Fifteen service pages is more writing and more design than five.
2. Selling online. Products, shipping rules, tax, payment handling.
3. Booking or scheduling. Especially when it has to match a calendar you already run.
4. Migration. Moving years of existing content without breaking the links Google already knows about.

If none of those apply to you, your project is on the small end, and you should be suspicious of anyone quoting you five figures.

Why I stopped selling the cheap version

Early on I charged very little for a website. I stopped, and I want to be straightforward about why, because it is the most useful thing in this post.

At a very low price the only way the math works is volume. Volume means templates, templates mean the same site with a different logo, and the client who needs an hour of actual thought does not get it, because there are nine more in the queue. I was doing worse work and charging less for it, and both of those were the same problem.

Quoting each job on what it actually takes means I can spend a day on your copy without resenting it. If one quote comes in higher than another, I will show you which part of the job is bigger. That is what the extra is buying: attention, not markup.

What to ask whoever you hire

Whether or not you call me, ask these five. The answers tell you more than any portfolio.

1. Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the design files when this is finished? The answer should be you, in writing, without a conversation about it.
2. Is this a template, and which one? A template is not automatically wrong. Being unable to get a straight answer is.
3. What happens when I need to change a price or add a service? Find out now whether that is an email, a login, or an invoice.
4. Will analytics be installed, and will you show me it recording a real visit? Installed and working are not the same thing, and the gap between them is invisible for months.
5. What is deliberately not included? Good answer: a specific list. Bad answer: "everything is included."

The short version

Every logo, website, app and piece of custom software I make is custom, and quoted as one fixed figure after a short conversation. What moves the price is scope: pages, features, integrations, and content to move. I will name each of those before you agree to anything. Payment plans are available. Local SEO and hosting are monthly, because both are ongoing work, not a product.

If a custom build is more than you need right now, I will tell you so, and point you to GoDaddy's do-it-yourself website builder through my storefront. It still looks good, you can build it in a weekend, and I am here when you are ready for custom. I would rather tell you that than take money you need more than I do.

I have been doing this in Phoenix since 2009. If you want a straight number for your specific project, get a free quote. Tell me what you are building and I usually reply within one business day. No credit card required.