Ask three companies what a roofing website costs and you get three numbers that are nowhere near each other. That is not because somebody is lying. It is because they are selling different things under one word, and the quote rarely says which.
The three ways it usually gets bought
A local agency builds you something bespoke. Typically a few thousand up to five figures, six to twelve weeks, and you will be asked for a brief, photographs and copy you do not have time to write. What comes back is usually good. What also comes is a project that stalls for a month because nobody sent the photos.
A freelancer does much the same job for less, often on a template. Faster, cheaper, and it lives or dies on that one person still answering their phone in two years.
A website builder is the cheapest by a distance, at the price of your own evenings. The subscription is small. The twenty hours of choosing fonts are not, and neither is the fact that the finished site tends to look like every other trade site built from the same template. What a free builder really costs goes through that route in detail.
The costs that turn up later
The quote is not the price. These are the lines that arrive afterwards, and they are worth asking about before you sign rather than after:
- Hosting and the domain, billed separately, often by a different company.
- Changes. Some contracts include a few a year, some bill by the hour, some by the change.
- Photography, if the design is built around images you do not have yet.
- Copywriting, for the same reason.
- An ongoing search retainer, sold alongside the build, sometimes for work that is never itemised.