Lost Pines Guide › Knowledge base
What should a small-business website cost around here?
Honest ranges for Bastrop County, what moves the price, and what we charge - stated plainly rather than hidden behind a phone call.
Nobody publishes this, which is why everybody guesses and half of
those guesses are wrong by a factor of ten. Here are the honest bands for a
small local business in this county.
Doing it yourself
A hosted site builder runs a modest monthly fee plus the domain. It is a
real option and there is no shame in it. The cost is your time, and the
failure mode is that the nine things search engines actually check quietly go
unset, because a builder makes the page look finished without making it
findable.
A repair on a site you already have
This is the commonest need and the cheapest fix, because the site exists
and works — the plumbing is simply unset. Title, description, structured
data, mobile, and the AI files. Low hundreds. We charge $349 for
exactly this, paid on delivery.
A new small site, built properly
A few pages, real copy, photographs, and the technical work done right
from the start: high hundreds into the low thousands, depending mostly on how
much writing and photography is involved rather than on the building.
A larger build
Booking, payments, inventory, logins, integrations: several thousand and
up. If somebody quotes this range for a five-page site, ask what is in
it.
What actually moves the number
- Words and pictures. Consistently the biggest variable, and
consistently the one people forget to budget. Text about the actual work beats
any amount of design.
- How many pages genuinely need to exist. Usually fewer than
proposed. One good page beats five thin ones.
- Whether anything has to talk to anything else — a booking
system, a till, a supplier feed. This is where cost jumps.
- Who owns it afterwards. Ask this before you sign, always.
Three questions worth asking anybody, including us
- Who owns the domain and the files when we are done? The answer
should be "you", without hesitation.
- What happens if I want to leave? Can you take the site with
you?
- Is there a monthly charge, and what is it for? Hosting is a real
cost. A monthly fee with no stated purpose is not.
Disclosure, since it belongs here. Lost Pines Guide
is free and always will be, and your listing and your score are free whether
you buy anything or not. We also sell the repair described above. Both of
those things are true and you should know the second one while reading the
first.
The free check is genuinely free and there is no
call unless you ask for one.
Terms on this page
- Domain
- The address people type. Rented annually, and it should be registered in the business's own name.
- Hosting
- The service that keeps the site online. A real recurring cost, usually small for a local business site.
- Site builder
- A hosted tool for assembling a site without code.
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