Ask five web designers in Dallas–Fort Worth what a website costs and you will get five answers. Four will be "it depends," and the fifth will be a number with nothing to explain it.
Almost nobody in this market publishes prices. We do, but the real problem with "request a quote" is that it leaves you unable to plan. You cannot tell whether the $900 quote is a bargain or a warning, or whether the $18,000 one is describing the same job.
So here are real numbers. What businesses around the Metroplex actually pay, what each level buys, and what to ask before you sign anything.
The four tiers, and who each one is really for
Do it yourself: $0 to about $600 a year
Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, GoDaddy. You pick a template, type your own words, and press publish.
The result is usually fine. Not good. Fine. For plenty of businesses that is the right amount of website. If you are testing an idea, or the site’s whole job is to prove you exist and show a phone number, this beats waiting two years for a budget that never arrives.
What the sticker hides is your time. Twenty to forty hours the first time, and more with every real change. Not free, but it is cash you keep, and early on cash is the whole game.
It stops working when the words have to do real selling, or when you notice you are avoiding it.
A freelancer: roughly $1,500 to $6,000
One person, often very good, usually juggling several jobs at once. DFW has a deep bench of them, and a strong freelancer at $3,500 beats a weak agency at $15,000 every time.
What you are buying is one person’s skill. What you are not buying is a bench. If they take a full-time job or lose interest, the project stops, and so does the only person who can update it.
Right for a business with clear ideas, a modest page count, and somebody in-house who can write. Ask what happens if they get busy, and get that in writing.
A small studio: roughly $4,500 to $15,000
Two to six people, design and build under one roof, usually with someone who writes and someone whose job is whether the thing converts. What the jump buys is not prettier pictures. It is that somebody asks who your best customer is before anyone opens a design tool, and that more than one person knows your site.
Right for an established business where the website is part of how work arrives. If one new customer is worth $5,000 to you, the arithmetic is not complicated.
A full agency: $20,000 and up, usually with a retainer
Around the Metroplex that tends to mean $20,000 to $75,000 for the build, plus a retainer of $2,500 to $10,000 a month for the marketing that follows. You get account managers, strategists, and process.
Genuinely right for multi-location businesses, anyone with an internal marketing person to direct the work, and anyone spending real money on ads who needs site and campaigns run together.
Wrong for most small businesses, and not because agencies are bad. You pay for coordination you do not need, and six people in a meeting about your homepage shows up on your invoice.
Why two quotes for the same thing can be four times apart
Usually because they are not describing the same thing. Five things explain most of the gap.
A quote is not a price. It is a description of the work with a number stapled to the end.
Page count. Ten pages is not twice the work of five, but it is not the same work. A quote with no page count is not a quote.
Whether anyone is writing. Copy is the biggest hidden variable. "Client supplies content" means you are writing it, at midnight, three weeks late, and every date in the timeline assumed otherwise.
Photography. Stock photos are free and they look it. A half day with a photographer runs $500 to $1,500 here and often beats another $3,000 of design.
Integrations. A contact form is easy. Online booking, payments, a customer portal, a sync to your CRM: each is real work, and each is where a cheap quote becomes change orders.
Who is actually doing the work. Some quotes include the person you met. Some route the build to a subcontractor you will never speak to. Only one lets you ask a question on Tuesday and get an answer on Tuesday.
The costs nobody puts in the quote
These are small individually and they surprise people every time.
- Hosting. Nothing to $50 a month. A fast, hand-built site at ordinary traffic often sits in a free tier. A heavy platform site does not.
- Your domain. About $15 a year. Trivial money, serious consequences if it is in the wrong name.
- Email at your own domain. Google Workspace is roughly $7 per person per month. Not optional if you want to look like a real business.
- Care and maintenance. Someone has to apply updates, confirm the contact form still delivers, and keep backups. Figure $30 to $300 a month.
- Copy and photos. Budget for them or plan to write and shoot them yourself. There is no third option.
The questions to ask, and the answers that should worry you
Who owns the site when we are done? You should own the site, the files, and the content outright, in writing.
Whose name is the domain registered in? Yours. Always yours. This is where small businesses get trapped: the domain sits in a designer’s personal account, the relationship goes sideways, and the address on your truck belongs to somebody else. "We take care of all that" is not an answer. Ask to log in.
Am I billed for hosting, or is the host billing me? If your web person resells you hosting at a markup, leaving means moving everything. A small monthly charge quietly works as a lock.
What happens if I want to leave? The right answer is boring. You remove their access and everything keeps running, because everything was in your name from the start.
How many rounds of revisions, and what turns into a change order? Unlimited revisions are either a fantasy or already priced in, and anyone who does this knows the three things clients ask for that were never in scope.
For the record, that is how we run it. Hosting, the domain, and Google Workspace are set up in the client’s own name and each provider bills the client directly. Nothing is resold and nothing is marked up. Leaving requires no migration, only removing our access.
What we charge, since we publish it
- One-page site, $1,200 flat. Contact form, domain and SSL, live in about a week. The full $1,200 credits toward a full website within twelve months, so it is a starting point, not a dead end.
- Full website, from $4,500. Most land between $4,500 and $8,000. Up to six pages, a messaging session, lead capture, photo direction, analytics, and three months of care.
- Apps and platforms, quoted per project. Most start around $15,000.
- Care plans at $29, $99, or $299 a month. Care and Partner are free for the first three months when we build the site.
Projects are half up front, half at launch, and nothing starts without a written scope. Those numbers put us in the small studio tier, which is where we belong. If what you need is genuinely the $1,200 job, we would rather tell you that.
So what does a website cost in Dallas–Fort Worth?
For most established small businesses here, a website that does real work costs between $4,500 and $8,000, plus $300 to $1,500 a year to keep it fast, current, and backed up.
Below that you are trading money for your own hours, a legitimate trade and sometimes the right one. Above that you are buying a team and a process, worth the money when you have someone to point it at.
So the wrong question is which quote is cheapest. The right one is what a single new customer is worth to you, and how many the site has to bring in before it has paid for itself. For most businesses here, that number is smaller than the quote that scared them.