Custom Website Design from $500 — Top-0.1% Agency Quality

I publish my website pricing because most agencies don’t, and that costs you weeks of back-and-forth. Starter sites at $500. Growth sites at $1,500. Scale sites at $4,000. Bespoke from $8,000. Four tiers, real numbers, no “request a quote” theatre. Here is what each tier actually contains, how I deliver it in 14 to 60 days, and why founder-led work outperforms agency-team work for SMBs almost every time.

Why I lead with $500 when most “real” agencies start at $5,000

The top SERP results for “small business website cost” all hide their pricing. You fill out a contact form, schedule a call, sit through a 45-minute pitch, and only then learn the floor is $8,000 or the retainer starts at $3,000 a month. That model exists because agencies want to anchor you on perceived value before showing the bill. I think it wastes your time and mine.

So I went the other way. I built four public tiers, capped my own scope at each one, and let buyers self-qualify. If $500 is your number, I have a clean Starter package that ships in 14 days. If $8,000 is your number, I have a Bespoke process that earns it. The point is that you know which tier you are in before you ever talk to me, and our call is about strategy, not pricing.

I have built around 30 sites in the $500 to $1,500 tier over the past 9 years, mostly for medspas, agencies, local service businesses, and Shopify side projects. The work is fast because the system is mature, not because the quality is cut. Every Starter site I ship would pass for a $2,500 build at half the agencies in the SERP. I just refuse to charge $2,500 for a 3-page site, because that is not what 3 pages cost to make.

The four tiers — what each one includes, who it fits, and what it costs

Starter — $500, 14 days, the fastest path to “I am open for business”

Starter is 3 pages: home, services, contact. Mobile-responsive layout on my proven theme foundation. Basic on-page SEO baked in: meta tags, semantic headings, image alt text, sitemap, and a clean URL structure. A contact form that fires to your inbox and a backup database row. Google Analytics 4 and Search Console wired up. One round of revisions. No blog, no booking integration, no custom illustrations. If you need those, you need Growth.

I built Starter for the buyer who has $500 to spend and needs a credible web presence in two weeks. The most common Starter client is a solo medspa injector who just left a chain, a coach launching their first paid offer, or a Shopify operator who wants a brand site to point ads at while their store handles the cart. Starter is not a temporary site. I have Starter sites still running 4 years later, generating the same leads they did on day one, with nothing more than a paint refresh.

Growth — $1,500, 21 days, the tier I recommend for 70% of incoming requests

Growth is 8 pages, copywriting on 3 of them, full lead capture flows wired to your CRM, basic schema markup on every page, and 30 days of post-launch support. This is the tier where the site starts working for you instead of just sitting online. The 8 pages I usually build: home, services overview, 3 individual service pages, about, contact, plus a free-resource or lead-magnet page that drives organic traffic and email signups.

The copy on the 3 written pages matters. Most agencies hand you a Google Doc and ask you to write it yourself. I write the home page, the lead service page, and the about page in your voice, after a 60-minute interview. The remaining 5 pages get structural copy from me and your final pass. The result is a site that converts on day one, not a beautiful shell waiting for you to find time to fill it in.

Scale — $4,000, 30 days, for the SMB that is past validation

Scale is 15+ pages, fully custom design, full schema across every template, 3 lead-magnet integrations, and 60 days of post-launch support. The custom design means I am not adapting a base theme, I am building components from scratch using conversion-tested patterns I have refined over hundreds of split tests. The full schema means Service, Offer, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, and Article markup across the entire site, which materially improves both your traditional Google rankings and your citation rate in AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The 3 lead-magnet integrations are where Scale earns its keep. A free PDF download wired to Brevo or Klaviyo. A free calculator or audit tool embedded in the site. A multi-step quiz that segments leads by readiness. These three together typically lift visitor-to-lead conversion from the SMB benchmark of 2.6% to 5% or higher, which over a year on a typical traffic base pays back the $4,000 multiple times over.

Bespoke — $8,000+, 45 to 60 days, when “$4,000 is enough” stops being enough

Bespoke is everything I do at Scale plus a real discovery process, wireframes, three rounds of design, custom integrations, and a project timeline that respects the complexity of what you are building. I have shipped Bespoke sites for medspa groups with 5 locations, agencies with 20 service lines, and Shopify operators who needed a content layer their commerce platform could not serve. Each one ran between $8,000 and $24,000 depending on scope. Each one shipped within 60 days. None of them slipped past budget because I scope every milestone before the second invoice.

What I actually do in each phase — the 5-step process

The build is the same shape at every tier. Only the time spent in each phase scales with the tier.

1. Day 1 to 3 — Discovery. One 60-minute call. I get your offer, your audience, your competitors, your existing assets, and your non-negotiables. I send a one-page brief back within 48 hours that you sign off on before I start design.
2. Day 4 to 7 — Wireframe and copy outline. I show you the structural skeleton of every page. No design polish yet. We agree on what each page does before we agree on how it looks. This is where most projects die at other agencies because they skip it. I do not.
3. Day 8 to 14 — Design and build. I design in the browser, not in Figma. You see real pages on a real staging URL within a week. You comment inline. I iterate. We finalize.
4. Day 15 to 18 — QA. Full Playwright screenshot pass on desktop 1366×900 and mobile 390×844. Lighthouse audit. Schema validation in Rich Results Test. Form submission test end to end. Real email arrival. CTAs link to the right place. Sticky mobile CTA tappable. WhatsApp link working.
5. Day 19 to 21 — Launch. DNS swap, SSL verified, Search Console submitted, sitemap pinged via IndexNow, analytics live. I send you a 30-minute Loom walkthrough of the admin and a one-pager of “how to update each section.” You are independent on day one.

The technical stack I default to, and why

For 80% of clients, I build on WordPress with a clean parent theme, a vetted page builder, and a tight plugin stack: Rank Math for SEO, WP Rocket for performance, Wordfence for security, and a custom mu-plugin for whatever the client specifically needs. WordPress sits at 38 out of 40 on my SEO capability rubric, which I built from comparing 5 major stacks across 8 dimensions. Headless WordPress and Astro plus Sanity score 40 out of 40, but those are 5x the build cost for a 10% performance ceiling gain that most SMBs cannot capitalize on.

If you are a designer-led marketing team that wants self-service editing, I will build on Webflow Premium instead. If you are doing 1 million plus monthly pageviews and ad revenue is on the table, I will quote you a headless WordPress plus Next.js build, but that is Bespoke territory and starts at $20,000. I do not have a preferred stack. I have preferred clients. The right stack is the one that lets that client win.

If your build is going to ship in less than 21 days, you should book a call this week. Bookings are tight because I cap myself at 4 active builds at a time to keep quality high. Grab a 30-minute slot and I will tell you on the call which tier fits and when I can start.

How my pricing compares to the real market

My Starter at $500 is priced where a Fiverr build sits, but it ships with the same SEO foundation, schema markup, and conversion structure I put on the $4,000 Scale tier. The reason I can charge $500 is not corner cutting. It is that I have built a repeatable Starter process across 30 sites and the marginal cost of producing a clean 3-page site is genuinely low when the system is mature.

What this looks like for a real client

One of the medspas I built for last year started on Growth at $1,500. Three pages of copy from me, eight pages total, lead capture wired to their booking platform, and basic schema. They were at $12,000 a month in revenue when we launched. Sixty days later, they were at $18,000 a month, almost all of it from the contact form and the booking link the new site routed through. That math is in the full case study, which I anonymized at the client’s request but kept every real number in.

That medspa did not upgrade their site because it was old. They upgraded because the old one had no CTAs above the fold, no schema, no sticky mobile CTA, and a contact form that fired to an email address nobody monitored. The fix was structural, not visual. Most websites in this price range fail on structure, not aesthetics, and that is where I focus my time.

The questions I get asked every week

“Do I need a custom design at $500?” No. The Starter foundation is a polished template, not a custom Figma exercise. The conversion structure is what matters at this stage, not the snowflake design. Most $500 builds I ship would pass for a $3,000 site visually because the type system, the spacing rhythm, and the component library are tight.

“Can I bring my own copy?” Yes. Starter does not include copywriting because that is what keeps it at $500. If you have copy ready, I drop it in. If you do not, I either run a 30-minute interview and write headline plus subhead plus 3 paragraphs of body copy per page, or I quote that as a $300 to $500 add-on.

“What about hosting?” Hosting is your account, not mine. I recommend Hostinger LiteSpeed for under-100k pageviews per month and Cloudways or Kinsta above that. I configure whatever you choose. I do not mark up hosting because that creates a perverse incentive to pick the cheapest host instead of the right one.

“What if I need a landing page, not a whole site?” Then you want the landing page from $300 service, not this one. Single-purpose LPs ship in 7 days, A/B-ready LPs in 10 days, and full funnel sets in 14 days. Different scope, different price.

What I will not do, regardless of budget

I will not white-label someone else’s work. Every site I ship I designed, built, and tested myself, with my hands on the keyboard. If you hire me, you get me, not a junior the agency rotates in after the sales call.

I will not use deceptive trust signals. No fake “as seen in” logos. No fabricated reviews. No countdown timers that reset every visit. I have lost deals over this and I will keep losing them, because the kind of buyer who needs that stuff is not the kind of buyer I want to work with.

I will not lock you into proprietary platforms I built and you cannot leave. The code is yours. The CMS is standard. The hosting is in your account. If you ever want to move on, you can, with a one-day offboarding instead of a 90-day extraction.

How I handle the things that go wrong

Sometimes a build hits a snag. A plugin conflict on launch day. A client realises they need a fifth page after design is locked. A payment processor that takes longer to verify than expected. I build buffer into every timeline (14-day Starter is a 10-day build plus 4 days of buffer) and I do not pass small overages onto the invoice. Anything under 2 hours of unplanned work, I eat. Anything bigger, I flag immediately with a written estimate before I touch it.

The only invoice surprise you should ever get from me is a smaller one than quoted, which has happened on about a quarter of my Bespoke builds when the scope came in tighter than the original estimate.

Book the call

If $500 is your floor or $8,000 is your ceiling, book a free 30-minute call. I review your current site live, ship 3 specific fixes you can do this week, and quote your tier on the same call. No pitch. No pressure. Grab a 30-minute slot here, or text me directly on WhatsApp at +91 97297 12388 if that is faster.

I have 3 client slots open this month for new builds. Once those fill, the next opening is 6 weeks out. The buyers who book earliest get the calendar they want and the timeline they want.

FAQ

Book a free 30-min call → or call +91 97297 12388 or message me on WhatsApp.

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