Website cost calculator

What a website costs to run, builder by builder

A website's running cost has four parts, and most price pages show you one of them. The plan is the monthly subscription, and it is what every builder advertises. The domain is yours, bought from a registrar for roughly 10 to 15 a year, and only the free plans do without it. A percentage of online sales is charged by some builders on their cheaper store plans and by us on every paid plan, and it is the part that decides which plan is really the cheaper one once a shop is busy. And card processing, a few percent plus a fixed amount on each payment, goes to the payment processor whoever you build with, so it is left out of every table here, ours included.

The table below is the cheapest plan on each builder that gives you your own domain, then an online store, then appointment bookings, from each vendor's own US price page as read on November 4, 2026. Where a vendor advertises a first-term price and a higher renewal, the renewal is what is shown, because a website is a renewal decision every year after the first.

Plan names link to the page each price was read from. "Not stated" means the vendor's price page does not say whether it takes a percentage of store sales. GoDaddy and Shopify are not listed because their US price pages could not be read first hand on that date, and a figure we did not read is not one we will print.

Where the cheap plan gets expensive

A percentage on sales is small on a quiet month and decisive on a busy one. Two plans that differ by a few units a month and by one point of percentage swap places at a sales volume you can work out exactly: the price difference divided by the percentage difference.

• On Webkio, Starter (14.99 and 2%) against Growth Business (39.99 and 1%): above 2,500.00 a month in online sales, Growth Business costs less in total. The calculator above does this sum for your own figure and says so when it happens.

The same arithmetic applies elsewhere. Of the seven builders in the table, the ones that state a percentage on their cheapest store plan are Squarespace (Basic, 2%), Webflow (Ecommerce Standard, 2%); each of them sells a dearer plan with no percentage, and the crossover works the same way. The others either charge no percentage or do not say, and "does not say" is worth a question before you sign up.

What "free" costs

Square Online's free plan publishes on their subdomain rather than your own domain and can take orders. Webkio's free plan publishes on a webkio subdomain with a small "Made with Webkio" link, and every paid capability waits for a paid plan. A free plan is the right answer for a site that exists to be found: where you are, when you open, how to call. It stops being the right answer the day the site has to take money, on every builder, because that is where the plan boundary sits for all of them.

A worked example: a salon with online booking

A three-chair salon wants its own domain and online appointment booking, and takes 2,000.00 a month through the site in deposits and prepaid treatments. Run through the same arithmetic as the calculator, from the same prices:

The booking column is the one that separates the builders: several have no booking product of their own and send you to a third-party add-on with its own subscription, which is why a salon's cheapest plan is rarely the cheapest plan on the price page. Change the ticks at the top of this page to see your own business instead of this one.

The costs no calculator shows

• Your time. A template site takes an evening to make yours and an hour a month to keep honest. That hour is the real cost of running it yourself, and the reason some owners pay someone; Webkio vs hiring a web designer weighs it.
• Photographs and words. No builder charges for them and no builder supplies them. A phone and a good afternoon cover most small businesses; a product shop needs more.
• Email at your domain. Sold separately by every builder, usually by the mailbox per month. Not needed to run the site, often wanted beside it.
• Card processing. The processor's percentage plus a fixed amount per payment, on every builder. If you sell through a marketplace as well, the marketplace fee calculator puts both side by side.
• The things you are already paying for. A booking tool, a newsletter service and a form service each with its own subscription are the usual reason a "cheap" plan costs more than the dear one that includes them. List them before you compare plans; the break-even calculator is for the shop side of the same question.

How the cost differs by trade is written up separately: a small business website, a car rental website and a medical practice website each have their own page, and website builder vs hiring a developer is the question underneath all of them.