Most of what you pay for in a website isn't the pages. It's deciding what visitors need to do, writing and organizing the content, and connecting the site to whatever happens next, like an email, a booking, or a payment.
As rough bands: $500 to $1,000 for a small site that explains what you do and gives visitors a next step; $1,000 to $4,000 once you want to edit pages yourself and connect a newsletter or form; $4,000 to $10,000 for a small shop, bookings with deposits, or a members area; and $10,000 or more when the website is the front of a custom system. These are planning bands, not quotes.
Where these numbers come from
My two published projects are apps, so I don't have a DylTec website to point to yet. These are the bands the cost estimator on this site uses for websites. I checked them against published pricing guides for independent developers.
Those guides tend to put a basic brochure site at $500 to $2,500 with an independent developer, a site with a content editor at $2,000 to $6,000, and a store at $3,000 to $12,000. Agencies usually charge two to three times that for the same work.
What moves the price up
Each of these adds design, building, and testing time: more distinct page layouts; pages you can edit yourself; bookings or payments; accounts and logins; connections to email, accounting, or a spreadsheet; search across a lot of content; and moving content over from an old site.
Bookings and payments cost less on a website than in custom software. A website can usually plug in Square, Calendly, or Shopify, so nobody has to build checkout from scratch.
What keeps it small
A site stays near the bottom of the range when you already have the words and photos, visitors have one clear thing to do, and nothing has to be built behind the pages.
Writing the content is what catches people out most often. If it doesn't exist yet, plan for the time it takes, whether you write it or someone else does.
Costs after launch
A domain name is usually $10 to $20 a year. Hosting, updates, support, and small changes come on top.
With DylTec, a monthly care fee covers those ongoing costs. We agree on it before the build, and for a small site it is usually $20 to $50 a month. You own the site, the code, and the domain either way.
When a template is the better buy
If a builder like Squarespace, Wix, or Shopify does what you need, use it. You trade a lower start for a monthly subscription and less control. A custom site makes sense when visitors cannot find what they need, or the site has to do something a template cannot.
Getting a number for your site
The cost estimator gives you a band in four questions. Or send a brief with who the site is for, the one thing visitors should do, and whether the content already exists. I'll tell you which band it probably lands in, or whether a template would do.