How Much Does a Website Cost for a Small Business in Erie, PA?

Most articles about website pricing won't give you a number. They give you a range from $500 to $50,000 and a paragraph about how it depends. That's useless if you're a contractor in Millcreek trying to work out whether you can afford this before spring.

So here are my actual prices, and then the parts that change them.

The two ways to buy

$130 a month. Nothing down. That covers design, development, hosting, unlimited edits, support and ongoing updates, for a site up to five pages. Twelve month minimum, because the expensive part of the work happens in the first few weeks. After that you're month to month.

$3,800 up front, plus $25 a month for hosting. You own the site. Edits aren't included at that price — they're a $50 a month add-on — and ongoing support and updates aren't part of it either.

That's it. There isn't a third tier or a consultation before I'll tell you a price.

What the add-ons cost

• Extra pages: $100 each after the first five
• Blog: $250
• Online store: starts at $8,000

Five pages covers most service businesses. Home, about, services, contact, and one more — usually a gallery for trades, a menu for restaurants, or a single high-value service page for professional services. If you're a contractor who wants a separate page for roofing, siding, gutters and windows, that's four service pages instead of one, so you're at eight pages and $300 on top.

The store number is a floor, not a price. Product count, variants and shipping rules all move it.

What it costs you every year

This is the number people get wrong, because they budget the build and forget the rest.

On the monthly plan: $1,560 a year, and that's everything. No separate hosting bill, no maintenance retainer, no charge when you need the phone number changed.

On the lump sum: $3,800 once, then $300 a year for hosting. Add $600 a year if you want edits included.

Over a longer horizon they're closer than people expect:

The monthly plan is the cheaper of the two until month thirty-seven. After that the owned site pulls ahead and keeps going — by year five it's saved you $2,500.

So the honest summary is: if you're going to keep the same site for five years and you almost never need it changed, buy it. If you're inside a three-year horizon, or your site changes often enough that you'd be paying for edits anyway, the monthly plan costs less and includes more.

Why I don't charge an Erie price

People ask whether local work is cheaper. It isn't, and I'd be suspicious of anyone whose price drops because you're in Erie rather than Pittsburgh. It's the same work and it takes the same time.

What being local actually changes is different. I've seen your competitors' websites. I know which parts of the county your customers are searching from. If something breaks, you're dealing with the person who wrote the code, not a ticket queue in another time zone. That's worth something, but it isn't a discount, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What changes a quote, and what should worry you

Legitimate reasons one quote is higher than another:

• More pages. Ten pages is more work than five. This is the single biggest driver.
• A store. Taking payments is a different category of project from a brochure site.
• Content. If someone's writing your copy and arranging photography, that's real work that isn't design.
• What happens after launch. A quote that includes hosting, edits and support is not the same product as a quote that ends at launch, even if the headline number looks similar.

That last one is where most comparisons go wrong. Before you put two quotes side by side, work out what each one costs you over three years including everything. Some very cheap builds become the expensive option in year two.

Things that should make you ask harder questions:

• No written scope. If nobody has written down how many pages you're getting, the number is a guess.
• A price with no mention of hosting. It has to be paid by somebody. Find out who and how much.
• Nothing about who owns what. This one matters more than people realise, and it's worth asking directly: if I stop paying you, what do I keep?
• A quote you can't get in writing. Self-explanatory.

The cheap end

A $500 website is usually a template with your logo dropped into it, or a page builder someone set up in an afternoon. That's not automatically wrong. If you need an address and a phone number online this month and nothing more, it may be exactly right, and I'd rather tell you that than sell you something you don't need.

What you're not getting at that price is anyone who'll still be there in eight months, a site built to load fast, or any real attention to whether you show up in local search. Those are the things that take time, and time is what the price difference is.

I hand-code every site — no WordPress, no page builders, no templates. That's slower to build and it's why the number isn't $500. It's also why there's no plugin to break, nothing to patch every month, and no reason for the site to get slower over time.

What to do next

Count your pages first. Write down every distinct thing you'd want its own page for. That number, plus whether you need a blog or a store, is enough to price the job exactly using the figures above — you can work out your own quote before you ever call me.

If you land somewhere you weren't expecting, tell me the number you had in mind and I'll tell you straight whether it's doable.