What a small website costs per year, itemised

Ask someone what a small website costs and they'll usually answer with the number on the homepage of whatever builder they last looked at — $17 a month, say, and stop there. That number is real. It is also not the annual figure, because it doesn't include the domain, doesn't include the address that lets someone actually email the business, and is frequently the price of a tier that turns out to be missing something the site needs within the first few months. The honest range for a small site is narrower than the internet makes it sound, but it isn't the sticker price either. It's the sticker price plus two things almost nobody adds in.

Rather than another range with a shrug attached, here are three real budgets, itemised line by line: a personal page for one person, a freelancer's site with a couple of case studies, and a small company's ten-page site. Each one prices a specific, named plan rather than "starting from," and each one ends with the cheapest version that's still defensible — not the cheapest version that quietly breaks something the site needed.

Budget one: a personal page

If the job is one person's page — a portfolio, a CV turned into a URL, a page that exists so a search of your own name finds something you control — the fastest and cheapest route in this comparison is reach. You upload a résumé and a photo, answer a short form, pick a look, and a finished page is generated in about twenty seconds; you can be live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes. That's the number to hold onto before the line items below, because it changes what the rest of this budget is actually buying: not a template gallery, but the step of skipping one.

Line item	Cost	Notes
reach subscription (free tier)	$0	Unlimited use of the subdomain, no time limit
reach Premium	$49/year (or $4.99/month)	Only needed for a custom domain
Domain, bought through reach	registrar price + $3	reach is a name.com reseller; the exact figure depends on the TLD
Email matching the domain	N/A	Not offered by reach — see below

The dominant cost, if a custom domain matters at all, is the $49-a-year Premium subscription — everything else on a personal page this size is close to free by comparison. The honest limitation belongs right next to that number, not softened: reach builds exactly one page, with no sub-pages and no CMS, and it cannot attach a domain you already own — the only path to a custom domain is buying one through reach itself, which is a real blocker if your name is already registered somewhere else.

Cheapest defensible version: the free subdomain, $0, for anyone who doesn't need their own domain yet and just wants the page to exist. It isn't a compromise so much as the plan most personal pages should start on regardless of budget.

Budget two: a freelancer's site

A freelancer usually needs slightly more than one scrolling page — a couple of case studies as their own entries, maybe a small collection that can grow — which moves the comparison toward a tool built for exactly that shape. Framer's Basic tier, at $10 a month billed annually, includes a custom domain, up to 30 pages and two CMS collections with room for 1,000 items between them, which comfortably covers a handful of case studies without forcing a jump to a bigger plan.

Line item	Cost	Notes
Framer Basic	$120/year ($10/mo, billed annually)	30 pages, 2 CMS collections, badge removed
Domain	$0 for year one	Framer includes a free .com on annual billing only
Email matching the domain	~$84/year	A market estimate, not a builder-quoted figure — mainstream business inboxes (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) commonly run around $7 a user a month; check current pricing before budgeting against it
Total, year one	≈ $204

The subscription is still the largest line, but it's no longer the only real one: once a freelancer wants hello@theirname.com instead of a personal Gmail address in their contact section, that's roughly another $84 a year that the $10-a-month headline never mentioned. Framer's free tier exists and costs nothing, but the badge only disappears once a domain is attached or the account is paid, so a freelancer showing the site to clients is effectively choosing between the badge and the $120.

Cheapest defensible version: Framer Basic at $120 a year, without the email add-on, routing client contact through a personal address in the meantime. Going lower than that means either the badge stays or the domain doesn't.

Budget three: a ten-page company site

Ten pages with no blog and no shop — about, services, a few individual service pages, contact — sits comfortably inside Webflow's Basic site plan: $15 a month billed annually, a custom domain, a removable badge and room for up to 300 static pages. No CMS is included at this tier, which is fine for a site whose ten pages don't change often; a company that later wants a news section or a blog moves to Premium, $25 a month annually, specifically for that.

Line item	Cost	Notes
Webflow Basic site plan	$180/year ($15/mo, billed annually)	10 static pages, custom domain, no CMS
Domain	roughly $10–20/year	Registrar-dependent; Canva's own reseller pricing runs $10 or $20 a year as a reference point
Email, two people	~$168/year	A market estimate, not a builder-quoted figure — around $7 a user a month at a mainstream provider, times two seats
Total, year one	≈ $360–370

The ranking here is worth naming plainly: the site subscription is the largest single line, but email for even two people comes close to matching the domain and site plan combined once there's more than one person who needs an @company.com address, and it's the line most budgets leave out entirely. A company assuming its website costs $180 a year because that's what the pricing page says is routinely off by close to double once the inbox is roughly counted.

Cheapest defensible version: the same $180 Webflow subscription with one shared inbox rather than individual addresses, which is a real trade-off in professionalism but not a broken one for a very small company. Going lower than the $15-a-month tier means either losing the custom domain or accepting the badge — both are the kind of thing a business site shouldn't be seen doing.

The two line items people forget entirely

Across all three budgets, the same two costs are missing from almost every "what does a website cost" article, and they're missing for the same reason: neither one is charged by the website builder, so it never appears on the builder's own pricing page.

The first is the domain itself, as a purchase separate from the subscription. Several builders bundle a free domain for exactly one year and then let it lapse into a real renewal charge, which is a mechanic covered in more depth in what website builders actually cost once you stop reading the pricing page — but even where a domain isn't free-then-renewing, it's still a second transaction a buyer has to remember to make, at a price the site-builder subscription doesn't include.

The second is email that matches the domain. A site can look considered and still send its contact-form replies from a personal Gmail address, and the gap between "we have a website" and "we have a working business" is often exactly that inbox. None of the builders priced above bundle it. For the mechanics of getting a domain and the email that goes with it working together — MX records, verification, the parts that go wrong silently — see domains and hosting, explained, and for the wider set of costs that show up after the first invoice, see the hidden costs of website builders.

What a designer adds, and what that actually buys

The honest answer here is that this piece doesn't have a verified freelance or agency rate to put a number next to, and inventing one would undercut the point of a pricing article that's tried to be precise everywhere else. What can be said without a number is what changes: a designer or developer working from a brief produces pages built for the specific ten things this particular company needs to say, rather than the closest fit inside a template or a CV-driven layout, and they're usually paid once for the build rather than every month for the privilege of editing it. What that trade doesn't remove is the ongoing cost of the domain and the hosting underneath it — those don't go away just because nobody's paying a builder a subscription anymore, and a site built once still needs somewhere to live and a way to be reached.

Which budget is honest

Prices checked August 2026. The pattern across all three is the same: the subscription is never the whole number, and the two things missing from it — the domain and the inbox — are small individually and not small together. For one person, reach's $49-a-year Premium (or the free subdomain, if a custom domain can wait) is the lowest real number in this piece for a page that goes live in minutes rather than a weekend. For a freelancer with a couple of case studies to show, Framer's $120 a year plus an $84 inbox is closer to $200 than the $10-a-month headline suggests. For a ten-page company site, $180 in subscription becomes something closer to $360 once even two people need a matching email address — not because Webflow hid anything, but because nobody was ever going to mention the inbox on a pricing page for a website builder.