Ask four people in San Jose what a small business website costs and you will get four numbers that do not overlap. Somebody paid $600. Somebody paid $14,000. Both of them think they got a website.
The gap is real and it is mostly not craftsmanship. Here is what it is actually made of.
The bands, roughly
These are the ranges we see quoted in the South Bay for a small service business — a trade, a clinic, a shop — not e-commerce and not anything with a login.
| Band | What you generally get | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| $0 – $500 | DIY builder, a template, your own weekend. Or a very small hand-built site like ours. | Anyone who needs presence this month more than they need reach. |
| $1,500 – $4,000 | Freelancer, 5–10 pages, a customised theme, some copywriting help. | Most established local trades. This is the fat middle of the market. |
| $5,000 – $15,000 | Small agency, custom design, photography, 15+ pages, project management. | Businesses where the site is the primary sales channel, or where brand genuinely matters. |
| $15,000+ | Bespoke design and build, integrations, ongoing team. | Rarely a local service business. If you are being quoted this, ask what the integrations are. |
What you are actually paying for as the number goes up
Not, mostly, the code.A five-page brochure site is a solved problem. The HTML for a well-built one is a day’s work for someone competent, and no amount of budget makes a contact page more of a contact page.
Decisions. This is the honest bulk of it. What do the five pages say, in what order, aimed at whom. A $600 site and a $6,000 site differ mostly in how much thinking went into the words, and the words are what a customer reads and what a search engine indexes.
Content production. Photography, copywriting, and the grinding work of getting a busy owner to actually supply their service list. Agencies charge for this because it is genuinely the longest part of every project.
Overhead. Project managers, account managers, offices in expensive parts of the Valley. Real costs, but they buy you coordination rather than website.
The recurring number nobody quotes prominently
The build price is the one everyone compares, and it is the less important one. Ask what happens on month two.
A site with hours that went stale in 2024, a service you no longer offer, and a phone number from a previous carrier is worse than no site. Somebody has to change those things. The models are: you do it yourself in a builder, you pay hourly each time, or it is included in a monthly fee.
Ours is $40a month and covers hosting, SSL, uptime and the content changes you ask for. Whatever the arrangement, get it in writing before the build, because “we’ll sort that out later” reliably becomes $150/hour later.
The San Jose–specific part
Two things are genuinely different about this market.
The baseline is higher.Your customer’s day job may involve shipping software. The floor for what reads as a competent website is above what it would be almost anywhere else in the country, and a site that would pass elsewhere reads here as a business that might not answer the phone.
Local labour is expensive.Which is a real reason the middle band starts higher here than in most of the country — and also the reason a lot of San Jose agency work is quietly subcontracted out of the area anyway. Worth asking directly who does the building.
How to work out which band you need
Three questions, in order.
1. Where do your customers actually come from today?If it is 90% referral and repeat, you need presence and credibility — something to send people that does not embarrass you. That is the bottom band and spending more is optional.
2. Do you want the site to generate work, or hold work you already have?Generating work is not a build problem, it is a page-count and search problem. Local service businesses that rank tend to run 8–20 pages, and getting there is ongoing rather than a one-time purchase — which is what a retainer is for. Buying a fifteen-page site up front, before you know which pages earn, is usually the more expensive route to the same place.
3. Is there anything unusual about how you take money? Booking systems, memberships, quoting tools, payments. If yes, you are in the third band regardless of how simple the pages look, and nobody in the first two can help you honestly.
What we charge, for completeness
$250 for a five-page build, then $40 a month. We sit deliberately at the bottom of the range because the recurring work is where our business is, not the build.
What that does not include: e-commerce, booking integrations, custom illustration, or fifteen pages. We say so on the call rather than stretching the scope quietly, and if you need one of those we will tell you that you are shopping in a different band. The full detail is here.
One question worth asking every quote
“What happens if I want to leave?”
Who owns the domain. Whether you get the files. Whether the site is built on a proprietary platform that stops existing when you stop paying. A great many local businesses discover the answer to this at the worst possible moment, and it costs far more than the difference between any two bands above.