Real ranges for builders, freelancers, template setups and agencies, plus where Think Bright Sites sits and the costs that hide.
Every quote you get falls into one of four buckets. The ranges below are current at the time of writing and cover a typical service business site of five to fifteen pages. Bigger sites, online stores and custom software cost more.
The bucket you choose matters more than the number inside it. It decides who does the work, who fixes it next year, and what you can take with you.
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Hostinger and similar platforms charge a monthly fee that includes hosting. You do the work yourself. As of this year, most of them will generate a new site from a prompt.
The price is the lowest on this list, and we will not argue with it. What you trade is your time, and often your exit. Wix and Squarespace have no design export. On Wix Studio, Squarespace, Webflow, Duda and GoDaddy, AI edits are paid for by credits.
A freelancer builds the site, usually on WordPress with a page builder, and hands it over. The low end is a template with your logo dropped in. The high end is real design work.
The question to ask is what happens after handoff. Who updates the plugins? What is the hourly rate for changes? The build price is rarely the total price.
Some shops sell a packaged setup: a premium theme, a set of plugins, your content loaded in, and training. It is faster than custom work and more polished than doing it yourself.
You are buying a configuration, not a design. Expect the site to look like others built from the same kit. Expect ongoing hosting and maintenance fees on top.
A full agency redesign starts with discovery, moves through design rounds, and ends with a custom build. The high end includes copywriting, photography and a strategy document.
This is the right choice when your brand genuinely needs rethinking. It is the wrong choice when your current site works and only needs to be faster, cleaner and easier to edit.
Think Bright Sites rebuilds the site you already have instead of starting over. The self-serve plan is one start fee for the human week, then a low monthly billed annually or monthly, set with you in a conversation. It includes three looks, in-place editing and hosting on your domain. HANS does the work and a person approves it, which is why it costs a fraction of what an agency charges.
The managed Halo tier is enterprise marketing to your website, priced by strategies and platforms, with a person approving every change. It starts with a brand refresh, credited back over 12 months of the plan.
Compare that with the agency range above. A brand refresh at the top of our range costs about a third of a top-end agency redesign. It also starts from your existing content instead of a blank page.
Whatever you choose, add these to the quote before you compare.
Ask every vendor the same three questions. What is the total in year one? What is the total in year two? What do I take with me if I leave? The answers sort the list faster than the headline price ever will.
Paste your URL. We rebuild it, show you the match, and measure the speed. No template. No blank page. Human review from start to finish.
