If you've been shopping around for a website for your Miami business, you've probably noticed the prices are all over the place. One person quotes you $200. An agency sends you a proposal for $15,000. A freelancer on Fiverr offers to do it for $50. How do you make sense of any of this?
In this article I'll break down what different price points actually get you — honestly, without the sales pitch.
DIY website builders: $15–$50/month
Platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy let you build a site yourself with drag-and-drop tools. On the surface, it sounds great. In practice, here's what you're signing up for:
You'll spend 20–40 hours learning the platform, fighting with templates, and troubleshooting things that don't work the way you expect. The end result usually looks like a template — because it is one. You'll also never truly own your site. If you stop paying, it disappears. And if you want to migrate to something better later, you're starting from scratch.
For a business that relies on its web presence to generate customers, this is usually not the right call. It works fine for a simple personal site or a temporary placeholder, but it rarely looks professional enough to compete in a real market.
Cheap freelancers: $200–$800
There are a lot of people who will build you a website for a few hundred dollars. Some of them do decent work. Many of them will take your money, disappear for three weeks, send you something that doesn't match what you discussed, and then become unavailable when you need changes.
At this price point, you're almost always getting a theme installed on WordPress or a page builder like Elementor, with your logo and text dropped in. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but the execution matters enormously. A bad template, poorly configured, loads slowly, looks generic, and hurts your credibility more than having no website at all.
If you go this route, ask to see real work they've done for other clients — not demos, not mock-ups, actual live sites.
Small studios and experienced freelancers: $800–$3,000
This is where you start getting into custom work. At this price range, a good designer will spend real time understanding your business, your customers, and your goals before touching a design tool.
At Naranjo Estudio, most of our projects fall in the $400–$1,500 range depending on the scope — and every site is built from scratch, not from a template. That includes a mobile-first design, a contact form wired to your email, local SEO basics baked in, and a fast, clean codebase that won't slow down your Google rankings.
This tier is the sweet spot for most Miami small businesses: restaurants, contractors, salons, healthcare providers, and service businesses that need to look professional and show up on Google without spending agency-level money.
Agencies: $5,000–$30,000+
Large agencies have large overhead — account managers, project managers, designers, developers, and salespeople all on the clock. When you hire an agency, you're paying for all of that, regardless of whether you need it.
For a small or medium local business, a full-service agency is almost never the right fit. You'll be a small fish in their client pool, you'll go through layers of people to get anything done, and you'll pay 10x what you'd pay a studio for a similar result.
There are situations where agencies make sense — enterprise-level projects, complex custom applications, or businesses with very specific compliance requirements. For most local businesses in Miami, it's not where your money should go.
What actually affects the price
Beyond who you hire, the price is driven by a few key factors: how many pages you need, whether you need e-commerce, whether you need custom functionality, and how much content you already have ready.
A 3-page brochure site for a contractor is a very different project from a 15-page restaurant site with an online menu, a reservation system, and a blog. Be specific about what you actually need when getting quotes — vague requests get vague pricing.
The question nobody asks but should
Everyone focuses on what a website costs. Almost nobody asks what it costs to not have a good website.
If your current site — or lack of one — is causing you to lose even two or three potential clients per month, you're already losing more money than a new site would cost. A website isn't an expense. For a local business that depends on local customers finding them, it's infrastructure.
If you're ready to have a real conversation about what your business needs and what it would cost, reach out. No pressure, no sales pitch — just a straight answer.