How Much Does It Cost to Build a Website in 2026?

Ask five different people what it costs to build a website and you will get five wildly different answers. A freelance developer quotes $3,000 to $5,000. A boutique agency sends a proposal for $18,000. A Wix ad promises a professional site for $23 per month. An AI website builder claims you can be live in 30 minutes. All of these statements can be simultaneously true, and the reason most people find the question frustrating is that the answer depends entirely on what you actually need the website to do.

This guide breaks down the real numbers for each option in 2026, what you actually get at each price point, and where the hidden costs tend to appear after the initial build. The goal is to give you enough information to make a decision that fits your actual budget and actual business requirements rather than what a vendor happens to be selling.

The Real Cost of Hiring a Freelance Developer or Designer

A competent US-based freelance developer or designer building a standard brochure website — a homepage, about page, services page, and contact page — will typically quote between $2,000 and $5,000. That is an honest range for a reasonably skilled professional who is not the cheapest option on a freelance platform and not a specialist in enterprise systems either.

An ecommerce website with a product catalog, shopping cart, payment processing, and customer accounts is a more complex project. Expect a competent freelancer to quote between $5,000 and $15,000 depending on the number of products, the complexity of the variants and inventory system, and whether you need custom design work or are working from a template. A project at the lower end of that range is typically a well-configured Shopify or WooCommerce setup. A project at the higher end involves custom functionality that the platforms do not provide out of the box.

Ongoing maintenance is a cost that most business owners underestimate when budgeting for a freelance-built website. Security updates, plugin compatibility issues, performance optimization, and content changes are ongoing tasks. A reasonable freelance retainer for ongoing maintenance runs $100 to $500 per month depending on the scope. If you skip maintenance, you eventually face a website that is outdated, potentially insecure, and increasingly expensive to bring up to date.

What Agencies Charge and What You Get for It

Boutique digital agencies in the United States typically price a full website project between $10,000 and $50,000. Larger, more established agencies with well-known clients go well beyond that range. The price difference between a freelancer and an agency is not purely about labor cost; it reflects a fundamentally different service model.

An agency brings a team rather than an individual, which means a strategist, a designer, a developer, and a project manager are all involved. You get a process with defined phases, deliverables, and timelines. You get brand strategy input and a structured discovery phase before design begins. You also get accountability in the form of a company with a reputation to protect rather than a single freelancer who might become unreachable mid-project.

What you do not get from an agency is speed or flexibility after launch without additional cost. Change requests after the project is delivered go through a new scope and invoice process. A website that needs updates six months after launch will require either a maintenance retainer or individual change orders. The agency model is well suited to businesses that have a clear brief, a meaningful budget, and do not need to move quickly.

The Real Annual Cost of Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify

Self-serve website builders are marketed on their monthly price, which makes them look more affordable than they are when you add up the full annual cost and factor in everything you actually need. Wix plans run from $17 to $159 per month depending on the tier, with ecommerce features available only on plans at $29 per month and above. Squarespace plans run from $23 to $99 per month. Shopify plans run from $39 to $399 per month before transaction fees and before any third-party apps.

The app cost is where Shopify in particular can become expensive quickly. Most non-trivial ecommerce features on Shopify, including advanced inventory management, subscription billing, customer loyalty programs, and email marketing, require paid third-party apps. A store with a modest app stack might spend $100 to $300 per month on apps alone on top of the platform fee. That brings the real annual cost of a Shopify store to somewhere between $1,700 and $8,400 before payment processing fees.

• Wix annual cost: $200 to $1,900 depending on plan tier and add-ons
• Squarespace annual cost: $276 to $1,188 depending on plan tier
• Shopify annual cost: $468 to $4,800 in platform fees alone, plus apps
• Stripe payment processing: 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction on all platforms
• Domain registration: $12 to $20 per year on top of platform costs
• Custom design work: typically billed separately if you need more than the template offers

What You Actually Get for Free or Very Cheap

Free website builders exist and are useful for a narrow set of purposes. Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.com all offer free tiers, but each comes with constraints that make them unsuitable for a real business website. Free tiers include ads or platform branding on your site, limited storage and bandwidth, no custom domain (your URL includes the platform name), and no ecommerce functionality.

A free website from any major platform is appropriate for a personal portfolio, a placeholder while you figure out your direction, or a hobby project where professional presentation is not the point. For any business that needs to acquire customers, process payments, or build credibility with a professional web presence, the free tier is a starting point for exploration, not a production solution.

Where AI Website Builders Change the Math

The newest category in the website cost conversation is AI-generated websites, and it changes the math most dramatically for ecommerce. A traditionally built ecommerce store with payments, user accounts, product management, and customer email automation would cost between $5,000 and $15,000 through a freelancer and take four to eight weeks to build. An AI builder generates the same set of features from a prompt in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost.

The differentiation between AI website builders in 2026 is in what they generate by default. Some produce a design that still requires manual technical setup for payments, user authentication, and integrations. The better options generate the complete technical stack, not just the visual design, so that what you receive is a production-ready website rather than a starting point that still requires configuration.

Ongoing Costs to Budget for Regardless of How You Build

Some costs are present regardless of which building approach you choose. Domain registration runs $12 to $20 per year for a standard .com domain through registrars like Namecheap or Google Domains. Hosting, if it is not included in your platform or builder, runs $5 to $50 per month depending on the traffic and performance requirements of your site.

Payment processing through Stripe costs 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, which is the industry standard rate and applies regardless of whether you built your site yourself, hired a developer, or used an AI builder. On $10,000 in monthly revenue, that is roughly $320 in processing fees. Building that into your margin from the start prevents unpleasant surprises. A professional email address through Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 runs $6 to $22 per user per month and is worth having regardless of how you build the site.

How CodePup Eliminates the Build Cost Without Cutting Corners

CodePup generates a complete website from a single prompt, including user authentication, Stripe payments, product or content catalog, email automation, and an admin dashboard, with automated testing on every build so that nothing arrives broken. There is no template configuration, no plugin installation, and no developer required at any stage. The cost of the build is a fraction of what a freelancer would charge for the same feature set, and the timeline is under 30 minutes rather than four to eight weeks.

One feature worth highlighting specifically for business owners is the analytics dashboard with CSV and Excel upload capability. If you currently track sales, inventory, or customer data in a spreadsheet, you can upload that file directly into CodePup's analytics dashboard and generate business reports from your existing data without rebuilding your tracking system from scratch. For owners who have been running a business manually and are moving online, this closes the gap between the data they already have and the insights a proper analytics tool provides. The result is a website that is ready to work for your business from the moment it goes live.