This is the question I get more than any other, and most people asking it have already had two quotes that were thousands of dollars apart for what sounded like the same website. That's not you being confused. That's the industry being genuinely opaque.
So here's the honest version.
Why the range is so wide
A website quote is really four things bundled together, and different shops weight them completely differently:
- How many pages — a one-page site and a ten-page site are different amounts of work.
- Who writes the words — if you write them, that's cheaper. If somebody has to interview you and write them properly, that's real hours.
- Where the photos come from — your phone, a shoot, or stock (and I'd argue against stock).
- Whether anybody set it up to be found — a pretty site nobody searching for you will ever see is a brochure, not a website.
The $500 quote is usually a template with your logo dropped in and nothing done to the fourth item. The $15,000 quote is usually an agency with an office, account managers, and overhead you're paying for whether you use it or not.
What I charge, and why it's on the website
My prices are published on the pricing page, which is unusual in this business and deliberate. If a marketer won't tell you a number until they've had a call with you, the number depends on what they think you'll pay. Mine doesn't.
The short version: a single-page site starts at $750. A five-page local business website is $2,500. A bigger site with service and location pages is $4,500. Kentucky charges 6% sales tax on website work — that's the state's, not mine, and I show it as its own line rather than hiding it in the total.
The question worth asking instead
Not "how much is a website." Ask what it needs to do. A roofing company that needs to catch storm calls at 9pm needs something different from a salon that needs to fill Tuesday afternoons. One of those might genuinely be a $750 one-pager. The other probably isn't.
That's most of what happens in a Blueprint Session, and it's free — including the part where I sometimes tell people they don't need a new website at all.