How Much Does a Business Website Cost in 2026? Real Price Ranges

10 July 2026 pricingguide

In 2026, a website for a small business will cost you anywhere from around PLN 200 to well over PLN 15,000. That huge spread isn’t pulled out of thin air — the phrase “a website” hides completely different products, different billing models and different amounts of manual work. A plumber in Piaseczno who needs a brochure site with a phone number and a price list is buying something quite different from a property developer with a unit configurator. The trouble is that both are often quoted using the same word: “a website”.

This article breaks the price down into its component parts. I’ll show the real ranges for each of the four main routes (freelancer, agency, a builder like Wix, WordPress), the hidden costs that only surface after a year, and I’ll work out how much a typical small service business actually needs. All the figures are rough market ranges — a specific quote always depends on scope, region and who you happen to work with.

Four routes to a website and their real prices

Freelancer: around PLN 1,500–4,000 per project

A freelancer is the most popular choice for small businesses that want a website “made by someone”. For a simple brochure site (home page, services, contact, sometimes a gallery) you’ll usually pay from around PLN 1,500 to 4,000. The bottom end is often a student or someone earning a bit on the side after hours; the top end is an experienced professional with a portfolio and a process.

What do you get for that money? It depends on the person, and that is the biggest risk of this route. One freelancer will hand you a polished site with speed optimisation and basic SEO; another will drop a USD 59 ThemeForest template, swap the logo and charge you PLN 2,500. From the outside, both offers look identical.

Things worth asking about before you sign anything:

Does the price include hosting and the domain for the first year, or is that a separate cost?
Who makes changes after the project is delivered, and how much do they cost?
What happens when the freelancer changes careers two years from now? (That’s not a hypothetical — it’s one of the most common reasons businesses end up stuck with a site nobody can touch.)

Turnaround time: anywhere from a week to two months, and in practice it depends heavily on how quickly you supply the text and photos. A lot of freelance projects stall not on the code, but on the content the client “will send next week”.

Agency: around PLN 4,000–15,000, sometimes much more

A digital agency will usually quote a simple business website from around PLN 4,000–6,000 and up. A site with a custom design, a dozen or so subpages and a CMS in place is more often PLN 8,000–15,000. Online shops and projects with non-standard features (bookings, configurators, integrations with the company’s systems) start where those ranges end.

And here’s an important point, because this article is meant to be honest: an agency is sometimes the best choice. If you’re building a shop with several hundred products, need an integration with a warehouse system, are planning ad campaigns with dedicated landing pages, or your brand needs a design built from scratch — paying an agency tens of thousands of złoty is reasonable. You get a team (designer, developer, project manager), a contract, a schedule, and someone who picks up the phone when something breaks.

The problem starts when a hair salon with three chairs gets a PLN 9,000 quote for a site meant to show a price list, photos and a “call us” button. It’s then paying for the agency process — briefs, meetings, mockups, rounds of revisions — that its project simply doesn’t need. We go into more detail on when the agency process earns its keep and when it’s overpaying for ritual in agency website vs AI generator.

Agency turnaround time: usually 4–12 weeks from signing the contract.

DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace, WebWave): a subscription that never ends

Builders advertise with slogans like “a website for free” or “from PLN 0”. In practice the free plan means the builder’s ads on your site and an address like yourcompany.wixsite.com — something no business should be sending to customers. A sensible plan with your own domain and no ads costs around PLN 80–130 a month in 2026, which is PLN 1,000–1,500 a year. Every year, forever.

On top of that comes your time. A builder doesn’t build the site — it gives you a tool to build it yourself. For someone who enjoys that sort of thing, it can be an evening or two of pleasant tinkering. For a business owner whose last “design” was in PowerPoint, it’s often a dozen-plus hours of frustration that end with a site that looks like a template — because it is one.

Let’s add up the three-year cost: 3 × ~PLN 1,200 in subscriptions = about PLN 3,600, plus a dozen or more hours of your own work. For that money you could have a site from a freelancer. A builder only wins when you want to change your site’s content and layout often and by yourself — that’s when you’re paying for the freedom. We take apart the detailed comparison of this model with the done-for-you approach in the article Wix vs done-for-you website.

WordPress: a “free” system, with everything around it paid

WordPress is free — as software. A WordPress website is not free, and never has been. The real bill looks like this:

Hosting: around PLN 150–400 a year for decent shared hosting (the PLN 50 ones exist, but tend to be slow, and a slow site is a real cost in lost customers).
Domain: around PLN 60–120 a year for a .pl (the first year is often a promo for a few złoty, with renewal at full price — the classic trap).
Premium theme: a one-off of around PLN 200–400 if you don’t want to look like every free template.
Paid plugins: forms, backups, cache, SEO — realistically PLN 0–600 a year depending on your appetite.
Updates and security: and this is the line almost everyone leaves out of the calculation. WordPress with plugins needs regular updates. Neglected for a year, it can get infected — and cleaning up a hacked site is a service that runs from a few hundred to a few thousand złoty. Technical maintenance (upkeep, updates, backups) usually costs around PLN 100–300 a month with a provider.

On top of that there’s building the site itself: either you do it yourself (dozens of hours of learning), or you pay a provider the same rates as a freelancer or agency — after all, WordPress is their core working tool.

For a business brochure site that just needs to load fast and stay maintenance-free, WordPress can be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut — and a sledgehammer you have to service every month at that. You’ll find a comparison with the static approach, where there’s nothing to hack or update, in WordPress vs a static website.

Hidden costs that surface after a year

The quote you get up front is almost never the full cost of owning a site. Here are the lines that most often catch business owners out in the second year:

Domain renewal — the first year for PLN 5–10 on promo, renewal for PLN 80–120. Registrars make their living from the fact that nobody reads the renewal price list.
Hosting after the promo period — the same mechanism: the first year PLN 100, the following ones PLN 250–400.
SSL certificate — it should be free these days (Let’s Encrypt), but some hosts still sell a paid SSL for PLN 50–150 a year, counting on the customer not knowing better. If someone tells you to pay for the “padlock”, ask why.
Fixes and changes — a price-list update, a new employee on the “team” page, different opening hours. With providers these are billed by the hour (around PLN 100–200/h) or in a maintenance package. Three small changes a year can cost as much as hosting.
Technical maintenance — mainly relevant to WordPress and other CMSs: updates, backups, monitoring. Around PLN 1,200–3,600 a year if a provider handles it.
The cost of neglect — the hardest one to quantify. A site that loads slowly, doesn’t work on a phone, or hangs with a database error message doesn’t show up as a cost on any invoice. It shows up in the customers who landed, gave up and called a competitor.

So the honest question to ask any provider isn’t “how much does a website cost?” but “how much will this website cost me over three years?”.

Cost comparison: four routes side by side

	Upfront cost	Yearly cost (from year 2)	Your time	Who builds it
Freelancer	~PLN 1,500–4,000	~PLN 200–500 (hosting + domain) + fixes by the hour	small	provider
Agency	~PLN 4,000–15,000	~PLN 500–2,000 (hosting + maintenance)	medium (meetings, briefs)	team
Builder (Wix etc.)	~PLN 0 + your work	~PLN 1,000–1,500 subscription	large (you build it)	you
WordPress (yourself)	~PLN 300–800 (hosting, theme) + your work	~PLN 400–4,000 (hosting, plugins, maintenance)	very large	you
Sitario (done-for-you)	PLN 249 with hosting for a year	PLN 149	~10 minutes (a brief)	AI + automation

Figures are approximate, as of 2026. Ranges with specific providers can fall outside the table in either direction.

How much website does a small service business really need?

Here we get to the heart of it, because a large share of the costs in this industry is paying for things a small business doesn’t need.

Take two typical cases. A plumber in Piaseczno: his customer lands on the site from a search or a referral, wants to check whether the business looks credible, what it does, roughly what it charges and how to call. A hair salon: the customer wants to see the price list, photos of the interior and results, opening hours and an address with a map. Neither of these scenarios needs a CMS, a shop, a blog or a “content management system with an admin panel”.

A list of what such a site actually has to have:

A clear offer above the fold — who, what, where. No slogans.
Contact visible from everywhere — a click-to-call number on mobile, a form for those who prefer to write.
Map and business details — address, hours, tax number in the footer.
Customer reviews — genuine ones, ideally embedded or transcribed from Google.
Fast loading on a phone — because most local searches happen on mobile, often on a weak signal.
Correct SEO fundamentals — titles, descriptions, structured data, a sitemap. Not “SEO for PLN 1,500 a month”, just the technical base that lets Google understand what the business even does.

That’s the whole thing. Five to eight content sections, zero admin panels, zero monthly upkeep. The market prices this — as you can see above — at PLN 1,500 to 9,000 plus yearly costs, largely because until recently every site like this required manual human work: design, deployment, hosting setup, a certificate, a domain.

What automation changes: the done-for-you model

And this is where the approach we built Sitario on comes in: since a small service business’s website has a well-defined, repeatable scope, a large part of that manual work can be automated — not at the expense of quality, only at the expense of ritual.

Here’s how it works: you fill in a brief about your business (industry, offer, contact details — about 10 minutes), and AI backed by automation builds a complete site: content tailored to your industry, the visual design, the mobile version, technical SEO, an SSL certificate, hosting. After about an hour you get a preview of the finished site, and only then do you decide whether to pay. No deposits, no contract signed sight unseen, no judging a provider by their portfolio and hoping they’ll take your particular project seriously.

Price: PLN 249 for the lot, with hosting for the first year. Renewal from the second year is PLN 149 a year — less than two months of a subscription with a typical builder. There are no technical maintenance fees, because the site is static: there’s no database to hack and no plugins to update.

To keep it honest, let me repeat what I wrote about agencies: this model isn’t for everyone. If you need an online shop, online bookings with payments, a multilingual corporate site or a design cut to fit a brand book — go to an agency or an experienced freelancer and pay for what genuinely requires human design work. Sitario solves a different problem: the business that needs a proper brochure site with its offer and contact details, while the market insists it pay as if for a bespoke project.

Summary: how to choose without overpaying

A short cheat sheet to finish:

You have a shop, non-standard features or a brand that needs a custom design → an agency (from ~PLN 4,000–6,000 and up) or a strong freelancer. That’s an expense that earns its keep.
You enjoy tinkering yourself and want to change your site often with your own hands → a builder like Wix, but work out the subscription cost over 3 years (~PLN 3,600+) before you call it “cheap”.
You want full control and are planning an extensive site with a blog → WordPress, but budget for hosting, updates and technical maintenance from the start. It’s a system that demands attention.
You run a small service business and need a solid site with your offer, contact, a map and reviews → work out a done-for-you offer. PLN 249 with a year of hosting and a money-back guarantee if you don’t approve the preview is a price level at which classic brochure-site quotes are hard to justify.

Whichever route you take: always ask about the three-year cost, not the upfront one, check the renewal prices for the domain and hosting, and make sure who will make changes and at what cost. Most of the disappointments in this industry don’t come from the price on the invoice, but from the lines that weren’t on that invoice.