A small business website is normally priced as a flat project fee rather than by the hour. Typical starting prices are $300–$800 for a single-page landing site, $800–$2,500 for a standard 4–6 page brand site, and $2,500–$6,000+ for a build with booking, e-commerce, or custom functionality. Quote the scope, not the hours — the same rule holds for a much smaller personalized digital good, like pricing a personalized lullaby or kids' story.
Those three tiers are FanBell editorial estimates, not survey results. The landing-page and brand-site tiers are benchmarked against Upwork's published project ranges of $300–$1,500 for landing page design and $1,500–$5,000 for business website design (Upwork, Hire Web Designers). The booking, e-commerce, and redesign tiers further down this page have no matching published benchmark and are unsurveyed assumptions — treat them as a starting point to test, not as market data.
Sourcing note: price benchmarks in this guide come from Upwork's published project-cost ranges; wage and employment-projection figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and O*NET OnLine; adoption figures come from Clutch's 2025 small-business website survey; FanBell mechanics are quoted from FanBell's own public pages with an access date. All links.
There are 36,207,130 small businesses in the United States, and 99.9% of all U.S. businesses are classified as small under the government's size standards. Website adoption among them is high but not universal: Clutch reports that 83% of small businesses have a website, up from 64% in 2018, and that 17% are still offline (Clutch, The State of Small Business Websites in 2025, published August 21, 2025). Pricing an incoming "can you build me a site?" request as a scoped, flat-fee build turns it into paid work instead of a favor — the same shift that turns "can you teach me the opening?" into priced chess lessons rather than a free favor.
What determines how much to charge for a small business website?
The price of a small business website tracks scope and complexity, not the hours you guess before seeing requirements. Six variables move the number: page count, design complexity, functionality, who supplies the copy and images, how many revision rounds are included, and how fast the client needs the site live. Settle all six in writing before quoting.
- Page count and structure. A single landing page is a different job from a home/about/services/contact/blog structure.
- Design complexity. A templated theme with color and logo swaps costs less to produce than a fully custom layout.
- Functionality. Contact forms, appointment booking, a product catalog, or payment collection each add build and testing time beyond static pages.
- Content ownership. State clearly whether the client supplies final copy and images or you're also writing and sourcing them — that alone can double the timeline.
- Revisions included. A defined number of revision rounds keeps scope from drifting; unlimited revisions should carry a materially higher price.
- Timeline. A rushed launch for an event or opening date justifies a premium over your standard turnaround.
Demand for the work is growing modestly rather than collapsing. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 5 percent employment growth for web developers and digital designers from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations, in the 2025–35 employment projections released August 27, 2026. The Occupational Outlook Handbook states the projection this way:
"Overall employment of web developers and digital designers is projected to grow 5 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations." — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Web Developers and Digital Designers, reflecting the 2025–35 employment projections released August 27, 2026 in news release USDL-26-1422 (BLS)
How much should you charge by project scope?
Common starting prices for a small business website are $300–$800 for a single-page landing site, $800–$2,500 for a standard 4–6 page brand site, $1,500–$3,500 once booking or intake forms are added, $2,500–$6,000+ for an e-commerce starter, and $800–$2,000 for a redesign. The last three are unsurveyed editorial estimates.
How these ranges were set (methodology, published September 2026): they are FanBell editorial estimates, not survey results — no sample of freelancers was polled, and no proprietary FanBell transaction data is behind them. Each range was benchmarked where a published equivalent exists, then set at or below the low end of that range because published agency-style cost guides blend in overhead, project management, and multi-person teams that a solo builder doesn't carry. Two published anchors were used: Upwork lists landing page design at $300–$1,500 and business website design at $1,500–$5,000 per project, and Upwork's own cost guide puts the cost of a website at $300 to $5,000 across industries and use cases. Where no published benchmark matches the row, the row is labeled an unsurveyed editorial estimate.
| Project scope | What's typically included | Suggested starting price | Nearest published benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single-page landing site | 1 page, template-based design, business info and a contact form | $300–$800 | Upwork lists landing page design at $300–$1,500 per project |
| Standard brand site | 4–6 pages (home, about, services, contact), custom design touches | $800–$2,500 | Upwork lists business website design at $1,500–$5,000 per project |
| Site with booking or intake | Standard site plus an appointment or intake-form integration | $1,500–$3,500 | Unsurveyed FanBell editorial estimate; nearest wider anchor is Upwork's $300–$5,000 overall website cost range |
| E-commerce starter site | Standard site plus a product catalog and checkout | $2,500–$6,000+ | Unsurveyed FanBell editorial estimate; Upwork's business-website guide lists a "Custom-designed small business site: $2,000-$10,000+ (including design, development, and content)" |
| Redesign of an existing site | Audit of the current site plus a rebuilt version | $800–$2,000 | Unsurveyed FanBell editorial estimate; no matching published benchmark found |
Treat every figure above as a starting point you adjust, not a promise of what any specific client will pay or what you'll earn from a given number of orders. Clutch reports that 90% of small businesses plan to invest in their website over the next 12 months; that figure measures planned website spending in general and does not measure repeat purchases from the same freelancer.
Should you price a website as a flat fee or by the hour?
A flat fee tied to a defined scope is the clearer default for a small business website: the client knows the full price before agreeing to anything, and you are not justifying every line of an hourly invoice. Hourly billing fits open-ended maintenance after launch, where the work genuinely varies week to week. A quick creative commission follows the same scoped, flat-fee logic — see how to price a caricature commission for the same reasoning applied to a single-deliverable creative order.
| Situation | Flat project fee | Hourly billing |
|---|---|---|
| Scope is written down before work starts | Best fit — the price is fixed to a named deliverable | Client carries the overrun risk and often resists |
| Scope is vague or the client is still deciding | Risky — you absorb every extra round | Better fit, with a written hour cap |
| Maintenance and small fixes after launch | Awkward — the work varies month to month | Best fit |
| Rush timeline for a fixed launch date | Best fit — charge a premium on the fixed price | Harder to cap or predict |
| Client wants total budget certainty before signing | Best fit | Weakest fit |
Two published hourly anchors are useful when sanity-checking a flat quote. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median annual wage of $92,650 for web developers in May 2025 and $104,000 for web and digital interface designers (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). O*NET OnLine, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, expresses the same 2025 web-developer median as $44.54 per hour. On the freelance-marketplace side, Upwork reports a median hourly rate of $21 for web designers, with rates typically between $15 and $30 (Upwork, Web Designer Hourly Rates).
"Design, build, or maintain Web sites, using authoring or scripting languages, content creation tools, management tools, and digital media." — O*NET OnLine, Web Developers occupation summary, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor (O*NET OnLine)
Those wage figures describe employment and marketplace bidding, not what you must charge, so use them only for arithmetic. As an illustrative assumption rather than a measured benchmark — no public dataset reports hours per freelance website project, so substitute your own tracked hours — a landing page that takes 15–20 focused hours works out to roughly $25–$45 per effective hour inside a $300–$800 flat fee, once revisions are counted. Log your actual hours on the next two builds and re-run that division before setting your next tier. The same effective-hourly math is worth running if you're instead pricing a per-session gaming coaching offer.
How developers get paid for code-review DMs and how designers get paid for portfolio and design feedback cover the same flat-fee-over-hourly approach for adjacent request types many web builders already field.
What should a small-business-website package include?
A small-business-website package should name six things before the client pays: the exact pages and sitemap, who supplies copy and images, the platform or CMS you build on, the number of revision rounds included, the delivery window, and what is explicitly excluded. Anything left unnamed becomes a free revision later.
- Page count and sitemap. Name the pages included, not just "a website."
- Who provides content. State whether final copy and images come from the client or from you, and at what added cost if from you.
- Platform. Say whether you're building on a specific website builder, a CMS, or fully custom code, since that affects what the client can edit later.
- Revision rounds. Define how many rounds of feedback are included before extra revisions cost more.
- Turnaround. Publish a delivery window you can hit, and check it against any delivery cap your selling platform enforces.
- What's excluded. Ongoing maintenance, copywriting, SEO campaigns, and paid ads are commonly separate add-ons, not part of a base build.
Collecting payment before you start protects the scope you just wrote down. Should creators require a deposit upfront? covers why payment-first ordering protects your time on multi-week builds.
When should you raise your website pricing?
Raise your website pricing when demand or capability changes, not on a calendar. Four concrete triggers justify a higher price: your build queue is consistently full, your portfolio now shows completed sites in the client's niche, incoming requests keep exceeding your defined scope, or you have added real technical range such as booking flows or checkout integrations.
- Your queue is consistently full. If you're regularly turning down or delaying new build requests, your current price is likely below what demand supports.
- You have a stronger portfolio. Completed sites you can show — especially for a niche similar to a new client's business — justify pricing above where you started.
- Requests keep exceeding your defined scope. If a "standard brand site" listing repeatedly turns into a build with booking and e-commerce, either enforce the boundary or price the next tier explicitly.
- You've added real technical range. Learning to build booking flows, e-commerce checkouts, or custom integrations supports pricing above a template-only build.
You can raise your listed price for new requests at any time without changing what a client already paid for. Revisit pricing after a genuine shift in demand, portfolio strength, or scope rather than on a fixed schedule.
For FanBell users: how to list a website build
On FanBell, a website build is listed as a Creator Service: a fixed-price request the client pays for upfront, with a scope, price, and delivery window you set. A quick stack or platform recommendation, with no files exchanged, belongs in a Paid Private Question instead. Larger builds are split into separately priced phases. The pricing guidance above applies wherever you sell.
A Paid Private Question is text-only. FanBell's own feature page states: "Replies are text, written in a private thread — fast to send, and easy for the fan to save and reference later".
A Creator Service is the listing type that carries files in both directions. FanBell's feature page describes the delivery as "a written note plus up to 5 files (video, audio, images, PDF, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint), and/or a private link (Google Drive, Loom, Dropbox…) for anything larger," and adds that "the fan can also attach their own files when they order (a track, a resume, a screenshot), so you have everything you need before you start". That is what lets a client hand over a logo, a brand guide, or existing copy at checkout.
FanBell's listing editor caps the delivery window a creator can promise on a single shoutout or Creator Service at 120 hours, which is 5 days. FanBell publishes no separate help-center page for that limit; it is enforced in the product's delivery-window selector and was verified in the FanBell creator dashboard in September 2026. The 120-hour figure is a maximum a creator may promise, not a typical turnaround.
A multi-week project does not have to fit inside one 120-hour listing. Split larger builds into phases — a "Discovery & Wireframe" service first, then a separate "Full Build & Launch" service — so each phase is its own priced, paid-upfront request that fits inside the 120-hour cap. FanBell is the payment and request layer, not a website host, so a delivery should point the client to wherever the site actually lives: their own hosting account, a builder platform, or a repository you hand off.
What do you keep after FanBell and Stripe fees?
On a $500 website build a FanBell creator keeps about $425, on $1,500 about $1,276, and on $3,500 about $2,978, using U.S. domestic-card assumptions. FanBell charges a 12% platform fee on the price the fan pays, and the payment-processing fee is deducted separately from creator earnings. Both figures below are planning estimates.
FanBell's published fee rule, quoted from its pricing page: "The fan pays only the displayed price. FanBell charges a 12% platform fee, and payment-processing fees are deducted separately from creator earnings. Creator earnings = fan payment − platform fee − processing fee" (fanbell.link/pricing, accessed September 2026).
The fee order is therefore defined rather than assumed: the 12% platform fee is calculated on the price the fan pays — the gross, before processing — and the payment-processing fee is a separate deduction from creator earnings. FanBell is free to start, with no monthly fee and no follower minimum. Payments and payouts run through Stripe (fanbell.link/how-it-works, accessed September 2026), and Stripe's published rate for a standard domestic card payment in the United States is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful charge (Stripe pricing). International cards, currency conversion, and manual entry carry additional Stripe fees, so the table below is a simplified U.S. domestic-card estimate.
| You charge | Stripe processing, 2.9% + $0.30 | FanBell fee, 12% of the price the fan pays | You keep, estimated |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | $14.80 | $60.00 | $425.20 |
| $1,500 | $43.80 | $180.00 | $1,276.20 |
| $3,500 | $101.80 | $420.00 | $2,978.20 |
These are planning estimates, not guaranteed payout amounts. Actual deductions vary with card type, currency, refunds, and disputes — check your dashboard for the exact figure on any order.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers on where this guide's price ranges come from, whether a creator has to host the client's site, how template and custom builds should differ in price, what happens when a build outruns FanBell's 120-hour delivery cap, whether a business license is required, and what FanBell charges on a website sale.
Where do the price ranges in this guide come from?
The scope table is a set of FanBell editorial estimates published September 2026, not survey data, and no sample of freelancers was polled. The landing-page and brand-site rows were benchmarked against Upwork's published project-cost ranges of $300–$1,500 for landing page design and $1,500–$5,000 for business website design, and sanity-checked against the $92,650 median annual wage the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports for web developers in May 2025 (BLS). The booking, e-commerce, and redesign rows have no matching published benchmark and are unsurveyed assumptions.
Does a creator need to host the client's website?
No. FanBell handles the paid request and delivery, not website hosting. Deliver the finished build as files or a link to wherever the site lives — the client's own hosting account, a website builder, or a repository — and be explicit in your listing about who owns that hosting relationship going forward.
Should a template-based site cost less than a fully custom build?
Generally yes, since a templated build takes less design and development time than a custom layout coded or designed from a blank page. Price the difference into your tiers rather than charging the same rate regardless of how much original work a project requires.
What if a website build takes longer than FanBell's 120-hour delivery cap?
Split the project into phases and sell each as its own Creator Service — for example, discovery and wireframes as one paid listing, then the full build and launch as a second. Each phase then fits inside the 120-hour (5-day) maximum delivery window that FanBell's listing editor enforces, verified in the FanBell creator dashboard in September 2026, and each phase gets paid before that stage of work starts.
Do I need a business license to sell website builds through FanBell?
FanBell's published setup process does not list a business license as a platform prerequisite for enabling Creator Services. Local business licensing, contractor registration, and tax rules vary by location, so confirm what applies where you operate rather than assuming the platform requirement is the only one.
What does FanBell charge on a website sale?
FanBell is free to start with no monthly fee and charges a 12% platform fee only when a fan pays, with payment-processing fees deducted separately from creator earnings. There is no follower minimum, and payouts run through Stripe once a client's payment is collected.
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