Ask three Austin web designers what a site costs and you will get three versions of "it depends," which is true and completely useless when you are trying to budget.
So let us be specific. Below is what different kinds of sites actually cost around Austin, what genuinely drives the price, and which line items are worth paying for.
The short answer
For a small local business in the Austin metro, a custom website generally lands between $1,200 and $5,000. Most service businesses, the window cleaners, the pressure washers, the HVAC crews, sit near the bottom of that range. Multi-page builds with e-commerce or custom integrations sit at the top or above it.
Our own builds start at $1,200. The full breakdown is on the pricing page, and there is no setup fee or deposit before you have seen a working demo.
What you get at each level
Under $500: templates and DIY
Wix, Squarespace, or a freelancer dropping your logo into a purchased theme. It will look fine and it will function. What you are giving up is differentiation and, usually, speed: template builders generate heavy pages that Google measures and marks down.
This is a reasonable choice if your website is a formality rather than a lead source. If you need it to bring in work, you will likely rebuild within two years.
$1,200 to $3,000: a custom small business site
A site designed around your specific business rather than a theme. Typically five to eight pages, written for the searches your customers actually use, fast, mobile-first, with SEO built in rather than sold separately.
This is where most local service businesses should be. It is enough to compete in local search, and it is not so much money that the site has to produce miracles to pay for itself.
$3,000 to $10,000: bigger builds
E-commerce, booking systems, customer portals, custom integrations with software you already run, or a much larger content structure. The cost is in the functionality, not the design.
$10,000 and up: agency territory
Larger organizations, multi-location structures, custom applications. If you are a local service business and someone quotes you this, ask precisely what you are getting for it. Sometimes the answer is genuinely good. Sometimes you are paying for an account manager and an office.
What actually drives the number
- Page count. The single biggest factor. Five pages is not five times one page, but it is not one page either.
- Content. If you have photos and copy ready, the build is faster. If someone has to write your service descriptions and take photos, that is real work and it costs.
- Functionality. A contact form is standard. Online booking, payments, logins, and inventory are not.
- E-commerce. Selling products changes the project category entirely: products, variants, payments, shipping, tax.
- Integrations. Connecting to a CRM, a scheduling tool, or a POS adds work that scales with how cooperative that software is.
Notice what is not on that list: how pretty it looks. Design quality is mostly a function of who you hire, not how much you spend.
The ongoing costs nobody mentions up front
The build is one number. Running the site is another, and it is the one that surprises people.
- Domain: roughly $12 to $20 a year. Unavoidable, and you should own it personally, not through your designer.
- Hosting: anywhere from free to $30 a month depending on how the site is built.
- Maintenance: updates, security, backups, content changes. Either your time or someone else's.
- SEO: commonly billed at $500 to $2,000 a month by agencies in this market.
That last one is worth pausing on. A lot of studios quote a low build price and then sell search visibility back to you monthly. We include the foundational SEO work in the build, because a website nobody can find is not a finished website. What that covers is on the SEO services page.
Our monthly plans start at $150 and are optional. They exist because sites that never get touched slowly stop ranking, not because the site stops working without one.
Questions worth asking any Austin web designer
- Do I own the site and the domain? If leaving means losing your website, that is not a website, it is a rental.
- Is SEO included or extra? Get the answer before you sign, not after.
- Can I see it before I pay? We build a free working demo first. Not everyone will, but it is worth asking why not.
- Who makes updates, and what does that cost? Find out before you need a price change made on a Friday.
- Is it custom or a template? Both are legitimate. You should just know which one you are buying.
So what should you budget?
If you run a local service business in the Austin area and you want the site to bring in work rather than just exist, budget $1,200 to $3,000 for the build and decide separately whether ongoing help is worth $150 to $500 a month.
Weigh that against what one job is worth to you. If your average job is $400, a site that brings in one extra job a month has paid for itself before the quarter is out. If your average job is $8,000, the maths stops being a conversation.
Not sure where you land? Call us and describe the business. We will give you a real number, and we will tell you if you do not need us.