How Much Should I Charge to Make a Website? Pricing Guide for Freelancers

Freelancers typically charge $500 to $1,500 for a basic site, $1,500 to $5,000 for a custom small business site and $5,000+ for stores and complex builds. How to set your price, with a worked formula and monthly plans, September 2026.

Short answer (updated September 19, 2026): most freelancers charge $500 to $1,500 for a basic template-based site, $1,500 to $5,000 for a custom small business site, and $5,000 or more for online stores and complex builds, plus $50 to $300 a month for ongoing care. The right price for you comes from your target hourly rate multiplied by honest hours, not from what others charge.

Build your client website. Start free with a template site and publish it on a we.inc address, no card. Or describe your business in one prompt and the We.Inc AI builder drafts the whole site, on paid plans from $20/mo. Start building free, or start from a design made for web design agencies, marketing agencies or consultants.

This guide gives you a formula, market ranges to check it against, and the monthly plans that turn one-off projects into steady income.

TL;DR

How much to charge to make a website: market ranges

ProjectBeginnerExperienced freelancerSpecialist or senior
One-page site or landing page$200 to $600$600 to $1,500$1,500 to $4,000
5-page small business site, template$300 to $1,000$1,000 to $2,500$2,500 to $5,000
5 to 10 page custom design$1,000 to $2,500$2,500 to $6,000$6,000 to $15,000
Online store, under 100 products$1,500 to $3,000$3,000 to $8,000$8,000 to $20,000
Redesign of an existing site$500 to $1,500$1,500 to $5,000$5,000 to $12,000
Monthly care plan$30 to $75$75 to $200$200 to $500

These are typical ranges from freelance marketplaces and published freelancer price pages in 2026, and they vary widely by country. Use them to sanity-check your own number, not to set it.

The pricing formula

Project price = (estimated hours x target hourly rate) x 1.2 + direct costs.

Step 1: find your target hourly rate

Work backwards from what you need to earn:

  1. Decide your yearly income target, for example $60,000.
  2. Add business costs: software, equipment, insurance, tax set-asides. Say $10,000.
  3. Estimate billable hours. Freelancers rarely bill more than 60% of working time; 1,000 to 1,200 billable hours a year is realistic.
  4. Target rate = $70,000 / 1,100 hours = about $64 an hour.

The freelance rate calculator does this in a minute.

Step 2: estimate hours honestly

For a typical 5-page small business site:

TaskHours
Discovery call and brief2
Sitemap and structure2
Design or template customisation8 to 15
Building pages and mobile layouts8 to 12
Copy editing and content loading4 to 8
SEO basics, forms, analytics3
Revisions (2 rounds)4 to 6
Launch, domain and handover2
Total33 to 50

Step 3: apply it

At $64 an hour and 40 hours: 40 x $64 = $2,560, x 1.2 buffer = $3,072, plus any direct costs like premium plugins or stock photos. Round to $3,000 or $3,100 and present it as a fixed project price.

The 1.2 buffer covers the unbilled work every project has: emails, waiting for content, small extras. Most new freelancers skip it and quietly lose money.

Hourly vs project vs value pricing

For agencies and freelancers packaging these into tiers, the agency pricing calculator helps set Good, Better, Best prices.

Charge for the monthly plan, not just the build

One-off projects make income lumpy. Care plans smooth it. A freelancer with 20 clients on a $100 a month plan has $2,000 a month before starting any new project. Typical plans bundle hosting, updates, backups, monitoring and an hour or so of edits. We cover structure and tiers in detail in website care plans, and what clients typically expect to pay in website maintenance cost.

The catch is your cost per site. If each client site sits on its own builder subscription at $20 to $40 a month, a $100 plan leaves a thin margin. A white-label website builder fixes that: all client sites run under your brand on one bill.

We.Inc white-label planMonthly priceClient sitesCost per site
Lite$9925About $3.96
Launch$499250About $2.00
Scale$9991,000About $1.00

Lite includes your own domain. At a $100 a month care plan, a site that costs you about $4 in platform fees leaves nearly all of the fee for your time and profit. The reseller margin calculator runs the numbers for your own prices, and white label for freelancers explains the setup.

How to raise your prices

  1. Raise for new clients first. Existing clients can stay on old rates for a while.
  2. Raise after every few wins. Ten to twenty percent at a time is common.
  3. Show outcomes, not features. "Your booking form now gets 12 requests a week" sells better than "responsive layout".
  4. Build faster, charge the same. AI builders cut the build hours. On We.Inc you can generate a client's first draft from a description in minutes, then refine it, which frees your hours for strategy and copy, the parts clients value most.
  5. Say no to projects that do not fit. Underpriced work crowds out better clients.

Common pricing mistakes

The bottom line

Set your website price from your target hourly rate and honest hours, then check it against the market ranges above. For most freelancers that means $1,500 to $5,000 for a small business site plus $50 to $300 a month in care. The buyer's side of this conversation is in how much it costs to build a website and website design cost; read them so you know what your clients are comparing you against.

Build your client website free today. Sign up free, start from a template site and publish it free on a we.inc address. AI builds from one prompt on paid plans from $20/mo. Prefer a head start? Start from the design for web design agencies, marketing agencies or consultants.

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We.Inc is an AI-powered website builder you can resell under your own brand. Launch a branded client dashboard, bill on Stripe Connect, and deliver AI-generated websites in minutes. White-label plans are custom priced, with no per-site fees.

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