Should I build my own website or pay someone?
Build your own website if you have the hours, you want to control every detail and a builder plan at $17 to $49 a month fits your budget. Pay someone if your hours are worth more than the difference, you want a first version within 48 hours rather than a site that goes live whenever you finish, or you have tried a builder before and the site is still half done. The cash gap is small; the time gap is the whole decision.
The rest of this page puts numbers on each side, from the vendors' own pages and from named cost guides, and leaves one number blank on purpose: how many hours a DIY site takes you. We found no published figure for that we would print, so the website cost calculator takes your own.
What does it cost to build your own website?
Building your own website costs $17 to $49 a month on the entry and mid plans of the big builders when you pay yearly: Wix Light is $17 a month billed as $204 up front, Squarespace Basic is $19 billed annually or $25 monthly, and Squarespace Plus is $49 or $65. An AI builder such as Durable runs $22 a month billed yearly or $25 monthly for its Launch plan. Hostinger's builder is $143.52 paid up front for 48 months, which it displays as $2.99 a month, renewing at $10.99.
Add a domain after the first free year on most of those plans, add any paid apps, and then add the number none of the pricing pages show: your evenings. The cash side of DIY is a few hundred dollars a year. The time side is yours to estimate.
How many hours does a DIY website take?
We have not found a published figure for how many hours a small business owner spends building a site on a builder that we would put on this page. What we can list is the work: choosing a template; writing a home page, a services page, an about page and a contact page; finding or taking photos and cropping them; setting up the contact form and testing that it emails you; filling in page titles and descriptions; connecting the domain; checking every page on a phone; and then repeating the editing whenever prices, hours or services change.
Put your own estimate on that list and multiply by what an hour of your working week is worth to the business. The website cost calculator does the arithmetic and shows the DIY total next to the done-for-you routes, over one, three or five years. The answer is different for a retired owner with free weekends and a contractor booked 6 days a week, which is why the calculator asks instead of assuming.
What does it cost to have a website built for you?
Having a website built for you costs anywhere from $15 a month to $15,000 up front, depending on who builds it. A freelance web designer charges $2,000 to $7,600 for a small business site by WebsiteSetup's 2025 guide, and an agency $5,000 to $15,000, with hosting at $5 to $25 a month on top. Done-for-you subscriptions sit in between: UENI charges a $79 setup fee and $24.99 a month, and B12's Professional plan is $199 a month.
FreeWebGuy is at the bottom of that range on purpose. The build is $0, hosting is $15 a month once you approve the preview, and the first version arrives within 48 hours of a brief that takes about 3 minutes. We use AI to build fast, and a person checks every first version before you see it. The full comparison of every route, with the same dated numbers, is on the compare hub.
Who actually builds small business websites?
Mostly not the owners. In Clutch's State of Small Business Websites 2025 survey (August 21, 2025), 83% of small businesses had a website, up from 64% in 2018. Of the sites recently launched, 45% were built by an outsourced partner, 37% by an in-house team and 8% by the owner. On platform, 41% used a DIY builder such as Wix or Squarespace, 34% WordPress or Shopify, and 12% were custom-built.
Read those two sets of numbers together and a pattern shows: plenty of sites live on DIY builders, but the owner is rarely the one who built them. Someone was paid, or someone on staff spent the hours. That is the market for a done-for-you website, and FreeWebGuy was set up to serve it at a price closer to the builder than to the agency.
How do you decide?
Ask four questions. Do you want to edit the site yourself, every time something changes? If yes, a builder suits you; if the thought makes you tired, it does not. Do you need custom features beyond pages, a form and a Book button? If yes, the comparison is with hiring a web designer, not a builder.
What is your budget this year, in cash and in hours? A builder is $204 to $588 in cash and all of the hours; FreeWebGuy is $180 and almost none of them; a freelancer is $2,000 or more and some meetings. How soon do you need it? A builder is live when you finish; a designer takes 4 to 8 weeks on average; FreeWebGuy's first version is ready within 48 hours of your brief.
If your answers are no, no, small, soon, you are the person FreeWebGuy was built for. If they are yes, yes, flexible, whenever, build it yourself and enjoy it. Both are good answers, and the website examples will show you what the first one produces before you commit to either.
Where FreeWebGuy fits, and where it does not
FreeWebGuy fits the owner who wants a professional site for a typical small business, wants it this week, and wants to approve it before paying. The team behind it has built 1,000+ websites. You send a brief, we build the full site, a person checks it, and the $15 a month starts only when you approve the preview and set up your SMBcrm plan. Reasonable revisions before launch are included, and afterward you edit with the AI builder and the platform's 24/7 chat support.
It does not fit three kinds of owner. One wants to own the site as files and host it anywhere; ours runs on SMBcrm hosting, with the design and platform licensed while the plan is active, and it goes offline if you cancel, with your domain, text, logo and photos staying yours. One needs custom features or a very large build; the scope comes from your brief, large builds are quoted first, and we review every brief and can decline one that does not fit. And one enjoys building websites. That owner should build one, and the guide to what a small business website costs has the numbers for every route.
