The four ways to get a website
Broadly, you have four options: do it yourself with a traditional builder, hire a freelancer, hire an agency, or use an AI website builder. They differ enormously in price, speed, and how much work falls on you.
The right choice depends on your budget, your timeline, and how custom you need to be. Let's price each one.
Freelancers and agencies: the custom route
A freelancer typically charges anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars for a small business site, depending on experience and scope. Add more for copywriting, custom features, or e-commerce.
Agencies sit at the top: a custom-designed, multipage site from a reputable agency commonly runs from several thousand into the tens of thousands, and bespoke or large projects go higher. You're paying for strategy, design, development, and project management.
Both routes also bill for changes after launch. A "quick update" is rarely free once the project is closed, so factor ongoing maintenance into the real cost.
Traditional DIY builders: cheaper but slower
Classic drag-and-drop builders advertise low monthly fees, and the base cost is genuinely modest. But the sticker price hides the real cost: your time.
You're the designer, copywriter, and developer. Getting a polished result means hours of fiddling with layouts, hunting for stock photos, and wrestling with templates — and anything beyond the basics often pushes you into a higher tier or paid add-ons.
The AI route: fast, predictable, and low-cost
An AI website builder changes the math. With SiteFast you start free and move to credit-based pricing across Basic, Pro, and Business plans, so cost scales with how much you build rather than how custom you need to be.
Crucially, the time cost collapses too. One prompt produces a complete, multipage site with a backend, and you refine it in chat — so you're not trading a low price for dozens of hours of DIY labor.
For most small businesses and founders, this is the best cost-to-result ratio available: a professional, full-stack site for a fraction of agency prices, live the same day.
The hidden costs everyone forgets
Whatever route you pick, budget for the recurring pieces: a domain name (a modest annual fee), hosting, and any third-party services like email or payments.
With SiteFast, hosting is handled on SiteFast Hosting and you can connect a custom domain, so there's no separate server bill to manage. Connectors like Stripe or Resend have their own usage-based pricing if you use them — worth noting so nothing surprises you later.
The biggest hidden cost of the traditional routes is iteration: every change after launch. AI removes that line item because you make changes yourself.
So what should you budget?
If you need a custom brand build and have the budget, plan for a multi-thousand-dollar agency project plus ongoing fees. If you want maximum control of spend and speed, an AI builder gets you a professional site for a small, predictable cost — often a fraction of a single agency invoice.
The smartest play for most people: start with AI, launch fast and cheap, and only invest in bespoke design once the site is earning its keep.