Anatomy of a $2,000 website
What actually goes into a small-business site at our starting price.
- A $1,490 site is ~40 hours of focused work, not "fast and cheap".
- The way we keep the price down is ruthless scoping — not cutting corners.
- Revisions, CMS handover, and ownership of the code are all included.
- We don’t charge monthly on the site itself. You own it on day one.
"How do you do a site for $1,490?" is the most common email we get. The short answer: we scope tight, we don’t re-invent, we don’t do revisions forever.
The long answer is below.
The 40-hour build
A $1,490 site at our rate is about 40 hours of work across 2–3 weeks. Here’s roughly where the hours go on a typical four-page build (Home, Services, About, Contact):
| Phase | Hours | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery call + brief | 2 | A one-page scoping doc, signed. |
| Copy (we write, you approve) | 6 | All four pages, written in your voice. |
| Design — home + one inner | 10 | Figma file, two rounds of review. |
| Design polish | 3 | Component library, tokens, responsive states. |
| Build in Astro / Next.js | 12 | Deployed staging link, password-protected. |
| CMS wiring | 4 | Sanity or Webflow, admin account, training video. |
| QA, Lighthouse tuning, launch | 3 | 95+ scores, DNS cutover, launch checklist. |
That’s 40 hours at our standard hourly rate, which is what $1,490 works out to once overheads and the free post-launch tweaks window are accounted for.
What we don’t do
- Five rounds of design revisions. You get two. After that it’s billable.
- "Wait, can we also have a members area and a booking system." Those are scoped as separate upgrades.
- Custom iconography from scratch. We use Lucide or Phosphor as a baseline.
- Recreating stock photography. We license where needed.
- Framer Motion on every element. Motion where it earns attention, not everywhere.
What the money does not pay for
A few things get confused with "website" that actually aren’t:
- Brand / logo design. If you don’t have one, we’ll refer or quote separately.
- Photography. We can direct a shoot or sign off on yours. Photographer cost is on you.
- Copy research. We interview you for 90 minutes and work from that — if you need external research, that’s another project.
- Ongoing updates. You can edit in the CMS, or bill us hourly.
Why it actually works
The secret to a fast build is not speed. It’s knowing exactly what you are going to make before you start.
Most site projects go over budget because the scope keeps moving. We spend a disproportionate amount of time on the brief precisely so that by the time we start designing, there’s almost nothing left to decide. Fewer decisions during build = fewer hours during build.
What you actually get
- A live site on your domain, on Vercel at cost (~$25/mo hosting, paid by you direct).
- A GitHub repo under your account. You own the code.
- A Figma file, not flattened. You can keep designing if you want.
- A CMS login, a loom walkthrough of how to edit things.
- Analytics set up, goals configured, a one-page dashboard pinned.
- Two weeks of unlimited small tweaks after launch. No meter.