Typical price ranges across the four realistic routes, what actually drives the number up or down, and the questions worth asking before you commit to any of them.
Short answer: there's no fixed figure, because "a website" means very different things depending on the route. A DIY builder is often free to start, plus a monthly subscription. An AI-generated site for a simple local business commonly runs from nothing up to a few hundred pounds. A freelancer typically charges anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of thousand pounds. An agency build commonly starts in the thousands. What you're actually paying for — your own time, someone else's time, or a model doing the first draft — is what moves the number, not the website itself.
"How much does a website cost" doesn't have one answer because it's really four different questions wearing the same sentence. Here's what each route typically involves, in UK terms, for a simple local-business site — a handful of pages, a contact form, nothing exotic.
Relative typical spend across each route for a simple local-business site — approximate and illustrative, not a quote. Every one of these ranges has real exceptions in both directions.
Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy and similar. Usually free or cheap to start, with an ongoing monthly subscription rather than a true one-off cost. The result is entirely down to how much time the owner puts into building and maintaining it themselves — there's no one else's labour being paid for, so there's no one else's labour showing up in the price.
A model writes the copy and lays out the pages from facts it's actually been given about the business, usually reviewed and finished by a person before it goes live. Cheaper than a freelancer largely because the first draft — normally the slowest part — takes minutes instead of hours. The honest limit is the same one: it can only write from what it knows, and won't invent a service, a price, or a testimonial the business never mentioned.
A person building the site by hand, or building on top of AI-generated groundwork. The price reflects real hours — understanding the business, writing or editing copy, testing it, fixing what breaks. See our guide on what to charge for this work for the pricing side of that conversation.
A team rather than one person, usually with strategy, design and development handled separately. Makes sense for a business that needs more than a handful of pages, but is rarely the right fit for a single local trade or independent shop — the overhead of a team is being paid for whether or not the job needs one.
Within any one of the four routes above, a few things move the price a lot more than which logo is on the invoice:
Whichever route you're leaning toward, these apply regardless of price:
There's no single figure — it depends entirely on the route you take. A DIY builder is often free to start with a monthly subscription on top, an AI-generated site typically runs a few hundred pounds or less, a freelancer often charges a few hundred to a couple of thousand pounds, and an agency build commonly starts in the thousands and can run well beyond that.
For some businesses, yes — it depends how much the site needs to do and how much time the owner has to build and maintain it themselves. A DIY builder usually means an ongoing subscription rather than a true one-off cost, and the result is only as good as the time put into it, which is exactly the gap an AI-generated or freelancer-built site is priced to fill.
Because a large share of the time a freelancer or agency spends — writing first-draft copy, laying out pages, picking a design that suits the trade — is done by the model instead of a person's hours. That's also its limit: it can only honestly write from facts it's actually been given about the business, not invent the parts nobody supplied.