What a small business website should cost, and what moves the price

Ask three studios what a website costs and you get three numbers that cannot be compared, because each one silently assumed a different site. This article does not give you a price. It gives you the list of things that move the price, so the quotes you collect describe the same job and you can see which one is honest.

Start from the job, not the page count

A website has one job: get a specific person to do a specific thing. A dentist wants appointments booked. A consultancy wants a call requested. A course wants a purchase. Everything else on the site exists to support that one action. When we scope a project at Tovanin, the first question is what that action is and how we will count it, because the answer decides whether you need a form, a payment flow, an account system or none of those.

Page count matters less than people think. Five pages with the right structure usually beat fifteen thin ones, and search engines agree: Google's own guidance on helpful content asks whether a page exists for people or for rankings. A short site written for a real customer is cheaper to build and easier to keep current.

The six things that actually change the number

Languages deserve a closer look because they are the factor most often underestimated. A second language is not a translation task bolted on at the end. It changes routing, sitemaps, metadata and, for Hebrew or Arabic, the entire layout direction. This site runs in English, Spanish and Hebrew, and the Hebrew version needed logical CSS properties throughout so nothing had to be mirrored by hand. Google explains how it expects localized versions to be marked up; doing that correctly on day one is far cheaper than retrofitting it.

Payments are a project inside the project

Taking money on a website sounds like one feature. It is at least four: the checkout, the confirmation, the record of who paid for what, and the path for refunds and failed payments. On EntrenAU, one of the products this studio runs, we integrated both Stripe and Wompi, because a card checkout that works in Spain does not always work for a customer in Colombia. That second provider was a real cost, and it was worth it only because the market required it.

If your business can start with a manual step, do that. A form that asks for a deposit by bank transfer costs almost nothing and tells you whether people will pay at all before you build the machinery.

Hosting: cheap to run, expensive to get wrong

Our sites run on Next.js and Firebase App Hosting. For a small business site the monthly bill is usually close to zero, because the platform scales to nothing when nobody is visiting. What costs money is a setup where the studio holds the hosting account and you cannot leave. Before you sign, ask who owns the domain, the hosting project and the analytics property. Our answer is that all three live in your accounts and we get access, not the other way round. We wrote more about that in what to check before hiring a studio.

Where the hours really go

• Content: writing and editing the text takes longer than laying it out. If you supply finished copy, the price drops.
• Decisions: every week you take to approve a design is a week of the studio's calendar. Fast decisions are cheaper.
• Integrations: each external system (CRM, booking, WhatsApp) has its own quirks and its own failure modes.
• Measurement: analytics, Search Console and error alerts are a few hours that most quotes leave out and most owners regret skipping.

How to compare two quotes fairly

Send both studios the same one-page brief: the action you want visitors to take, the languages, whether you take payments, which systems must connect, and who will own the accounts. Ask each for a fixed price and a delivery date. A studio that will not give you a fixed price for a fixed brief is telling you something. At Tovanin we price from that brief and put the number in writing before any work starts; you can see how the three services are scoped and what the portfolio looks like, or send us your brief and get a number back.