How much does a one-page website cost?
A one-page website costs anywhere from nothing to about $3,000, and the only thing that really moves the number is who builds it and how much of your thinking they do for you.
The short answer, by who you hire
Here is the honest range for a single-page site. These are general market ranges, not a survey.
Do it yourself on a builder: $0 to about $450 a year. Free tiers exist but put someone else's branding on your page and give you an address like yourbusiness.builderplatform.com. Paid plans with your own domain typically run $16 to $30 a month, which is $190 to $360 a year, every year, forever.
Fiverr, Upwork and overseas shops: $50 to $400 as a one-off. Sometimes less. This is a real option and plenty of people are happy with it.
An independent freelancer in the US: $600 to $2,000. Wide range because "freelancer" covers a student and a fifteen-year veteran.
A small local web shop: $500 to $1,500.
A proper agency: the standard anchor for a small business website is $2,500 to $9,000, and a one-pager from an agency usually lands near the bottom of that, $2,500 to $4,000. You are paying for account management, a discovery process and a design team.
Notice the gap. There is very little between $400 and $2,500, and that gap is where most small businesses actually live.
Why the same page costs $80 or $3,000
The HTML is not the expensive part. Four things drive the price.
Who writes the words. On a cheap job you send bullet points and get them back as sentences, or you get filler. On an expensive job someone interviews you, works out what your customers are actually worried about, and writes to that. Copy is the single biggest quality difference between a $150 page and a $1,500 page, and almost nobody says so.
Whether anyone thinks about the offer. A one-page site has one job: get somebody to ring you, book you, or come in. That means deciding what goes above the fold, what the button says, and what gets cut. That is an hour of thinking, and it is the hour that makes the difference.
Time zone and revisions. A $90 Fiverr page is usually built to a fixed template with one revision and replies that come overnight. That is not dishonest, it is what $90 buys. If you need three back-and-forths about the photo of your van, expect friction.
Overheads. An agency has a project manager, a designer, a developer and a sales pipeline to feed. Those are real costs and they are in your quote whether the job needs them or not.
What a one-page website can genuinely do
For a lot of local businesses, one page is the right answer, not a compromise.
It works if you do one main thing for one main type of customer in one area. A mobile mechanic. A dog groomer. A window cleaner. A single-location restaurant that mostly needs a menu and a phone number. A tradesman who wants something to send people to when they ask "have you got a website?"
A well-built one-pager will load fast, look right on a phone, show your services and prices, carry your reviews, hold a contact form and a click-to-call button, and be indexed by Google for your business name and often for your service plus your town.
What a one-page website cannot do
Be straight with yourself about this.
It will not rank for many different searches. Search engines rank pages, not businesses. One page means roughly one topic. If you want to show up for "gutter cleaning Toms River" and "roof repair Toms River" and "chimney flashing Toms River" as separate results, you need separate pages. That is the honest reason to buy five pages instead of one.
It will not carry a real portfolio, a blog, a service area list, or twelve separate service explanations without becoming a mile-long scroll that nobody finishes.
It will not sell products. That is a different build with payments, tax, shipping rules and stock.
It will not do your marketing. A website is a shop with the lights on. Somebody still has to bring people to the door.
The costs nobody quotes you
Two running costs exist no matter who builds the site, and they are small.
A .com domain is roughly $15 to $25 a year, paid to a registrar. Hosting for a small static site is $0 to $5 a month. Some hosts genuinely charge nothing at this size.
So the true annual running cost of a one-page site should be somewhere between about $15 and $85 a year. If someone quotes you $99 a month to "host and maintain" a one-page site, you are not paying for hosting. You are paying rent on a site you do not own. Ask what happens to the site if you stop paying. The answer tells you everything.
What we charge
Storefront Smith builds one-page websites for $500. One time. Not a deposit, not a monthly plan.
That includes the design and build, writing and tidying your copy, mobile layout, a contact form, click-to-call, your Google Business details wired in, basic on-page SEO for your business name and main service, and two rounds of revisions. Live in about two weeks.
Hosting and the domain are billed separately at cost, with no markup, because marking up a $19 domain would be silly. You own the domain, registered in your name. You own the files. If you want to move it somewhere else next year, you take it and go.
We can do it at $500 because the scope is fixed, the work is efficient, and there is no account manager between you and the person building the thing. Not because we found a trick.
Questions we actually get asked
Is a one-page website enough for a small business?
Often yes. If you offer one main service in one area and mostly need people to call or book, one page does the job. If you want to rank separately for several different services, you need a page for each.
Why do agencies charge $2,500 or more for one page?
Overheads and process. Discovery sessions, a project manager, a separate designer and developer, and multiple design concepts. That process has value on a large project. On a one-page site for a local trade, most of it is cost you do not need.
What are the ongoing costs after the site is built?
A .com domain at roughly $15 to $25 a year and hosting at $0 to $5 a month for a small static site. Nothing else is compulsory. Anyone charging $99 a month for a one-pager is charging rent, not hosting.