What should a website cost for a small beauty or wellness studio?

Three shapes, not one number

Almost every quote a studio owner gets is one of three shapes, and the shape tells you more than the figure does.

You build it yourself. Squarespace charges you annually, their pricing is on their own site, and beyond that it costs your evenings. Plenty of studio owners have built something they genuinely like this way.

An independent designer builds it once. You pay a single price, the site goes live, you own the account, and the relationship is over unless you want more work. Normally somewhere in the hundreds to the low thousands, depending on how many pages there are and how much of the search work is included.

An agency builds it and keeps it. A larger number up front, then a monthly retainer. The retainer is the actual product. The build is how they get you onto it.

None of those three is dishonest. They’re just very different bets, and the third one is the only one where the total isn’t knowable on the day you sign.

The arithmetic nobody does out loud

Say a build is quoted at $3,000 with a $500 monthly retainer. I’m picking round numbers to show the shape of it, not quoting anybody in particular.

• Year one: $9,000
• Year two: $15,000
• Year three: $21,000

Now put a one-time $1,000 build next to it. Same site, roughly. After three years one of those studios has spent $21,000 and the other has spent $1,000 plus their Squarespace plan.

The retainer can absolutely be worth it. Some studios want somebody actively working on their search presence every month, and if that work is real and you can see it, $500 is a fair price for it. What you should never do is pay a retainer because it was the only way to get the website. That’s a subscription attached to a thing that was finished eighteen months ago.

What you’re actually paying for

A website is about four separate jobs, and quotes rarely separate them, which is what makes two prices impossible to compare.

• The design. How it looks, how it reads, whether it looks like what you charge. This is the part everyone quotes on.
• The build. Turning that into real pages that load fast on a phone, with your booking system wired in and as few taps as possible between landing and booked.
• The search work. Page titles, structured data, a claimed and completed Google Business Profile, your name and address written identically everywhere it appears online, and pages that target searches people actually make. This is usually where the gap is, and it’s almost never itemized.
• The handover. Whether you leave with the logins, the guides and the ability to change your own hours without emailing anyone.

When you compare two quotes, compare them job by job. A $600 quote that includes the third item is worth more than a $2,000 quote that doesn’t, because the second one is a beautiful site nobody will find.

Costs you can’t avoid, and shouldn’t be charged twice for

• Your domain. Bought once a year, from a registrar, in your name. Small.
• Your Squarespace plan. Paid to Squarespace, annually, and hosting is included in it.

That’s the list. If a quote has a separate monthly hosting line on top of a Squarespace plan, ask what it’s for. If a quote says your domain will be registered under the designer’s account, walk away. That’s the single thing that makes leaving expensive later, and it’s why the first thing I do on any project is make sure the domain is in the client’s own name.

Five questions to ask before you sign anything

1. What happens to the site if I stop paying you?
2. Whose name is the domain registered in?
3. Whose account is the site built in, and do I have the login?
4. Is the search work included, and what specifically does it cover?
5. What does this cost me in year three?

Any designer worth hiring will answer all five in a paragraph without getting defensive. The answers are what you’re buying.

What I charge

I sell three flat prices and publish them on the services page, because a price you have to book a call to hear is a price that changes based on what the caller thinks you can afford.

The whole thing, built from nothing including all of the search work, is $1,000. An upgrade to a site you already like is $600. If the site is fine and the real problem is that nobody is finding it, that’s $350 on its own and I leave the design alone.

There’s no retainer on any of them, nothing renews, and the domain and the account are yours from the first day. You get a report from me each month with your own Search Console numbers in it, which is included and isn’t a subscription in disguise.

I can do it at those prices because there’s no office, no account manager, and I built the reporting tooling once so it runs across every client at the same time. The parts of this work that usually get billed by the hour cost me very little to repeat.