The honest answer nobody leads with: it depends on what the site has to DO, not how it looks. A five-page site that just needs to exist is a different animal from a store, a booking engine, or an interactive experience. Here's how the price actually gets built.
Template shops ($300–$1,000): your logo dropped into a theme thousands of other businesses use. Fast and cheap, but you inherit the template's speed problems, its sameness, and its limits the day you want anything custom.
Solo builders ($1,000–$7,000): custom design and code from the person you actually talk to. This is where I work — every dollar goes into the build because there's no account manager or agency office to feed. Use my cost calculator to see where your project lands.
Agencies ($7,000–$50,000+): real teams, real overhead. Worth it for enterprise complexity; overkill for most local businesses, who end up paying agency prices for work a senior builder does alone.
Page count matters less than people think. What matters: e-commerce (products, payments, taxes, fulfillment logic), custom functionality (calculators, booking, games and interactive tools), content creation (who's writing the words?), and SEO depth (a site built to rank costs more up front and pays it back for years).
Who actually does the work? What happens after launch? Is SEO built in or an upsell? Do I own everything when it's done? If a quote can't answer those in plain English, keep walking. Mine can — call or text (847) 387-0244 and ask.
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