What should a small business website cost in Tampa?

Ask three companies in Tampa to quote a website for a six-van plumbing business and you can get $400, $4,000 and $14,000. All three are quoting honestly. They're quoting different things, and nobody explains which is which — so here's the map.

The four price bands

DIY builders — roughly $15–$40 a month

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. You get the tools and you do the work: the writing, the layout, the photos, the hours, the service list. The software is genuinely good now.

What it actually costs is your evenings. Most contractors we talk to started one of these, got about sixty per cent through, and it's still sitting in a tab. That's not a failure of discipline — a website is a couple of days of unfamiliar work, and you already have a job.

Right for you if you enjoy this sort of thing, or you have someone in the office who does.

Productised builds — roughly $200–$2,000, one time

Someone else does the work, on a fixed template, for a fixed price. You get a real site, built by people who've built a hundred of them, without a discovery phase or a project manager.

The catch is the ceiling. If your business needs something genuinely unusual — a live inventory feed, a customer portal, a booking system tied to real crew availability — a productised build won't stretch that far, and a good one will tell you so rather than take the money.

Right for you if you need a brochure site: what you do, where, photos, hours, contact. Which is most trades, most of the time. (This is the band we're in — flat $200, and we build it before you pay so you can see what you're getting.)

Local agencies and freelancers — roughly $2,500–$10,000

Now you're paying for a person's attention. Discovery calls, custom design, revision rounds, your brand rather than a template dressed in your colours. For a business where the website is the storefront — a restaurant group, a dental practice competing on presentation, anyone selling online — that attention is worth real money.

For a one-crew roofing outfit, most of that budget goes on process rather than on anything a customer will notice.

Right for you if design is a competitive advantage in your market, or you need something a template genuinely can't do.

Full custom development — $10,000 and up

Software, not a website. Booking systems, customer accounts, integrations with your field service software, e-commerce with real inventory. Priced per project because no two are alike.

Right for you if the site has to do something, not just say something.

The number nobody quotes you

Ongoing cost. A site is not a one-time purchase. Somebody has to host it, renew the certificate, keep the software patched, and change the phone number when it changes. Expect $10–$50 a month for hosting and maintenance, and expect changes to cost something — either hourly, or on a retainer, or per request.

Ask about this before you sign anything. "How do I get the hours changed in November, and what does that cost?" is the single most useful question you can ask a web company, and the answer tells you more about what it's like to work with them than the design does.

Things worth paying for

• Fast loading on a phone. It's the whole game for a local trade.
• Someone who'll answer when you need a change. More valuable than any design decision.
• Owning your domain yourself. Non-negotiable. See below.
• Real photos of your work, if you don't have any and they'll go take some.

Things not worth paying for

• A logo redesign you didn't ask for, bundled into a website quote.
• SEO packages sold on a monthly retainer before your site even exists. Get the site right first.
• Pages you'll never update. You're paying for them twice — once to build, once every time the site gets touched.
• A CMS you'll never log into. If you're never going to edit it yourself, that flexibility is cost without benefit.

The two questions that protect you

"Do I own the domain?" It should be registered in your name, with you on the account. If the company holds it and you fall out, you can lose the address customers know you by. Anyone who won't put it in your name is telling you something.

"What happens if I leave?" You should be able to take the site elsewhere. Ask before you buy, not after.

Our own answer, for the record: a flat $200 to buy the site, $10/month to host it, and changes quoted per request — usually under $100. We build the whole thing first and show it to you, so you're deciding about something you can look at rather than something you have to imagine.