Why nobody gives you a straight number
A quote depends almost entirely on how much thinking someone else does for you.
At one end, you buy a subscription, pick a template, and type in your own words. At the other, someone researches your market, writes your copy, designs something specific to your business, builds it, and keeps it running. Both are "a website." They are not remotely the same amount of work, and the price gap reflects real labour rather than markup.
So the useful question isn't "what does a website cost." It's "which of these am I buying."
The four things you're actually paying for
Every quote is some combination of these, and the differences between quotes are usually just which ones are included.
Design. Deciding what goes on each page, in what order, and what it looks like. A template has made these decisions already, for a generic business. Custom design makes them for yours.
Build. Turning that into a working site. This is the part people assume is most of the cost, and it usually isn't.
Content. The words and the photographs. This is the most commonly underestimated item on the list, and the most common reason a project stalls for three months. Writing decent copy about your own business is genuinely hard, and most quotes quietly assume you'll supply it.
Upkeep. Hosting, the domain, security updates, and changing things when your business changes. This never stops, whoever builds the site.
When one quote is triple another, it's usually because it includes content and upkeep and the cheaper one doesn't.
The three shapes a price comes in
A monthly subscription to a builder. You pay a platform, you do the work. Cheapest in cash, and genuinely fine for a lot of businesses. What you're spending instead is your own time, and you're renting: stop paying and the site goes away.
A one-time project fee. You pay once, you own the result. This is the traditional model and it's clean. The catch is what happens afterwards. Six months on, when you need the hours changed, you're either paying an hourly rate, waiting on someone's availability, or editing it yourself.
A monthly all-in fee. Design, build, hosting and ongoing changes bundled into one recurring payment. Predictable, and the upkeep problem is somebody else's. The tradeoff is that you're paying continuously, and you should know exactly what happens if you stop. This is the model I use, and I've written down what it includes and what it doesn't precisely so that question has an answer.
None of these is the right one in general. They're right for different situations.
The costs that aren't in the quote
Your domain. Small, annual, and yours. Make sure it's registered in your name, not your web designer's. This matters more than almost anything else on this list, and people find out the hard way.
Hosting. Sometimes bundled, sometimes not. Ask.
Apps and plugins. The booking system, the online store, the appointment reminders. On builder platforms these are frequently separate monthly subscriptions, and three or four of them can quietly cost more than the platform itself.
Your own time. If the arrangement is that you'll write the content and keep it updated, that's real work you're committing to indefinitely. It's a legitimate choice. It just isn't free, and it's the cost that most often turns out to be bigger than expected.
The next rebuild. Sites age. Something built today will look tired in five years or so, and platforms change underneath you. Whatever you spend now, assume it happens again eventually.
What "cheap" actually costs
I'm not going to tell you that inexpensive websites are a trap, because often they're the correct decision. A brand new business with no revenue should not spend heavily on a website. Get something up, find out whether the business works, then invest.
But be clear about which one you're doing. The failure mode isn't paying too little. It's paying a moderate amount for something nobody owns, nobody maintains, and nobody can change — so it sits there getting slowly more wrong until it's easier to start over than to fix. That's the outcome that actually wastes money, and it happens at every price point.
How to decide
A few questions that narrow it down faster than collecting quotes:
Does your website need to bring in customers, or just confirm you exist? A restaurant needs hours, a menu and a phone number that works on a phone. A contractor competing for work needs the site to do some persuading. Those are different budgets, and the second one is mostly about content, not code.
Will you actually maintain it? Be honest. Most people say yes and mean it, and then it's eighteen months later and the site still lists last year's prices. If the honest answer is no, pay for upkeep and stop pretending.
What happens if you and the builder part ways? Ask this before you sign anything. Who owns the domain, who owns the content, what happens to the site. A good answer is specific. A vague one tells you something.
The short version
For most small businesses the real number is smaller than the scary quotes and larger than the cheap ones, and the difference between a good outcome and a bad one has much more to do with content and upkeep than with how the site was built.
Work out which of the four things you're paying for, ask what happens after launch, and get the ownership question answered in writing. Do that and you can compare quotes that previously looked incomparable.
My own pricing is on a page, including what isn't covered, because I got tired of "contact us for a quote" too. If you want a straight answer about what your situation would cost, ask me.