How to price a website build for a small business client

If you bill hourly, getting better at your job makes you less money for the same result. Ten years of experience that lets you build in two days what used to take two weeks is, under hourly billing, a pay cut. That is a strange incentive to build a business on.

The alternative is not "charge more per hour." It is to stop selling hours.

Price the outcome, not the effort

A local business does not want a website. They want more booked jobs, a place to send people who found them on a map, or to stop looking less credible than their competitor. The value of that is not related to how long it takes you.

Practically, this means the first conversation is not about pages or features. It is: what is this supposed to change? If a new client is worth a few thousand dollars to them and the site brings two a month, the pricing conversation gets much easier — and it stops being a negotiation about your day rate.

Use three tiers

A single number invites a yes or a no. Three options change the question from whether to hire you into which version to buy. A structure that works:

1. Essential — a small, focused site that does one job well. Priced so it is an easy yes.
2. Standard — the version you actually want them to buy. More pages, real copywriting help, basic analytics and search setup.
3. Complete — Standard plus the things that take real time: custom design work, ecommerce, integrations, ongoing support.

Most clients pick the middle. That is the point — build the middle tier to be the one you would have proposed anyway, and let the outer two define it.

Write down what is not included

Scope creep is rarely one big request. It is fifteen small ones, none of which felt worth arguing about. The defence is a proposal that states the boundaries in advance:

• How many pages, and what counts as a page
• How many rounds of revisions
• Who writes the copy — this is the single most common cause of a stalled project
• Who supplies photography, and what happens if they do not
• What happens to the timeline when the client goes quiet
• What is billed separately: hosting, domains, stock assets, third-party subscriptions

Add a line for out-of-scope work at a stated hourly rate. You will rarely need to invoke it. Its job is to make "could you also just…" a decision instead of an assumption.

Take a deposit

Fifty percent up front, balance on launch, is standard and reasonable. For larger projects, bill against milestones instead. A client who will not pay a deposit is telling you something useful early, while it is still cheap to learn.

Bill the balance at launch, not after handoff. Once the site is live, urgency evaporates.

The part that compounds: recurring revenue

Project work resets to zero every month. A care plan — hosting, updates, backups, a small allowance of content changes — does not. Even a modest monthly fee across a dozen clients changes the shape of the business, because it covers the floor while you look for the next build.

Two rules keep this honest. Make the plan genuinely worth buying rather than a fee for doing nothing, and make sure the client can leave with their site intact. A care plan that is really just control over their domain is not recurring revenue — it is a dispute that has not happened yet.

A note on raising prices

The usual advice is to raise your rate until people say no. In practice, raise it on the next new client, not the current one, and change nothing else. You will find the ceiling is higher than expected, and that the clients who leave over a price increase were rarely the ones worth keeping.