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.