Full Transcript
[0:00]
Welcome to the 805 Web Minute. And today we're talking about why the advertised low costs of building a website yourself often ends up being the single most expensive choice for central coast business owners. It really is the ultimate paradox for business, isn't it? It seems that way. You start searching, you know, just trying to get a clear number on what this will cost. And the internet just hits you with this wild range. It's all over the place. Yeah, you see everything from what? $100 all the way up to $100,000. And that's just, it's completely useless if you're running a real business here in say, San Luis Obispo County. Absolutely. And that's why we wanted to do this deep dive. Our whole mission today isn't just to list prices, right? It's to cut through all that noise and break down what you are actually paying for in 2026. This is about the total cost, not just the sticker price. And we've seen it firsthand. We really have. We've been in the trenches, building sites for plumbers, speech therapists, even lumber yards right here on the central coast. We get the local reality. So looking at the source material, we see local business owners really funneling into three, uh, three traditional paths. And each one has its own. Let's call it a financial trap. Okay. Let's start with the big one. The one that gets everyone, the, uh, the siren song of affordability, option one, the DIY website builders. Ah, yes. Wix square space. You see the ads everywhere everywhere. And they are brilliant at marketing. They hook you with these crazy low starting prices, you know, $16, $17 a month. And you think problem solved. Exactly. I solved my website for less than my Netflix subscription, but those base plans, I mean, they're completely stripped bare. It's a marketing price, not the price you need to actually run your business. This is where things take a sharp turn. I've talked to somebody local owners, you know, a boutique spa in Paso robles or financial advisor into Pomo. And they all thought they were saving a ton of money until they need their website to actually do something. The second you want to handle, say customer appointments or take payments
[2:03]
or even just have a decent form that qualifies leads, you have to jump up two or three price tiers. And that's when they get you with their own internal apps. Precisely. The platform forces you to buy their premium features because integrating anything from the outside is either impossible or just way too complicated. So that's $17 plan. It balloons to $55 a month easy. Often more. And then there are the little things, the direct fees that just chip away at you. You have your domain renewal every year. Yep. 15 to 20 bucks after that first free year. And if you're selling anything, you can't escape those transaction fees. It's usually around what? 2.9% plus 30 cents a sale. That's the standard. But honestly, those little fees, they're nothing. They're a drop in the bucket compared to the real cost, the one they never, ever advertised the cost of your time. That is the hidden killer. And we just, we ask you to pause for a second and think about what your time is actually worth. If you're a plumber, a therapist, you're a skilled professional. Every hour you spend fighting with a website is an hour you are not billing a client. And the data shows most of these DIY sites take at a minimum 20 to 40 hours just to launch. That's just to get it live. That's setting up the pages, fiddling with the templates who it doesn't look cheap, finding images, wrestling with the forms. It's a huge time sink. So if we're conservative and say your time is worth $50 an hour, which for most business owners is low, very low. But even then you've already sunk a thousand to two thousand dollars of your own lost revenue into this cheap website. Yeah. And before it's ever made you a single penny. And before you factor in all the hours, you'll spend every month being your own IT department when something breaks. So it really only makes sense if you what genuinely love building websites or you have 30 plus hours, you can't monetize otherwise. Exactly. For a serious central coast business, the DIY road is a two thousand dollar time commitment, pretending to be a $17 subscription. Okay.
[4:03]
So you fight off that siren song. The next logical step for many is hiring a specialist. That brings us to option two. The unpredictable world of the freelance web designer. Right. You find a local person here in a royal grande or Pismo thinking you'll get professional results, but without that big agency price tag. And what does that typically look like upfront? It's a significant investment for a basic five cage site. You're probably looking at $1,500 to $4,000. If you need something more custom, you know, special scheduling or something, it can easily be three to eight thousand upfront, which on the surface doesn't sound terrible. You pay once you get a professional site isn't four grand better than losing $2,000 of your time and still having a clunky website. It looks better on paper, but here's the catch. And this is a massive vulnerability for a small business. Okay. You're essentially on your own the moment that initial invoices paid, meaning their job is done at launch. They're not invested in the long term success. Precisely freelancers sell a block of time to build a thing. Once it's built, you now own it. You are 100% responsible for it. Security updates, backups, plug-in issues. That's all on you. And if you don't know how to do any of that, you're calling it back. Yes. And that's when the hourly billing starts 50 to $150 an hour for a small change. But the real danger, the one we hear about all the time is when they just disappear. They get busy. They move on. They get a bigger client. They change careers. And suddenly you're stuck. You have a website and you have nobody to call in the inevitable happens. The inevitable being it breaks. Exactly. Your site goes down at 4 p.m. on a Friday. Think of a busy vet clinic in Santa Maria. They are now spending their weekend frantically trying to reach one person who might just be unreachable. Every hour that site is down is lost business, mass stress. So the true cost here isn't the money. It's the risk, the lack of guaranteed support. That's it.
[6:03]
It's a huge, unpredictable risk, which naturally leads us to option three. The web design agency. This is for businesses that decide, OK, I need a team. I need that guaranteed support. And I'm willing to pay for it. Agencies give you structure, process, quality control, huge advantages. But that all comes with premium pricing that reflects their overhead. So what's a real number for a small business site from a competent local agency? You're likely starting at five to $10,000. For anything complex like e-commerce, it can easily hit 20,000 or more just for the upfront build. And with an agency, unlike the others, the ongoing costs are not optional. They are baked into the deal. Yes. You have to budget for a maintenance retainer. And that's a big expense. We're talking 100 to $500 a month. And what is that actually buy you? It's not just hosting. It's security patching daily backups, licenses for premium software. And this is critical, making sure that after an update, all the different parts of your site still work together and don't break. So you're paying a high monthly fee just to keep the lights on and keep it secure. Correct. And any changes you want to make, that's still build hourly, usually a hundred to $200 an hour. Wow. And here's the other big capital hit. Web technology changes so fast that you're looking at a major redesign every three to five years, which means another five to $15,000 just to stay current. So we've laid out the three paths, DIY, which costs your time, freelancer, which is a huge risk. And the agency, which is stable, but very expensive. Let's zoom out like we promised. What does this really cost a business over five years? That's the only way to look at it, the total cost of ownership. And you have to remember, no matter which path you take, you're paying somewhere between $500 to $3,000 a year, just in maintenance, security and updates. It's just the cost of doing business online now. So let's run the numbers. Five years, what does that DIY option, the one that started at $17 a month actually cost over five years. The DIY path with Wix or Squarespace comes in at approximately $9,600.
[8:10]
Wow. That's nearly 2000 a year for a site you still have to manage and fix yourself. And a huge chunk of that about $6,000 is the value of your own time. It's pure opportunity cost. Right. Now what about the freelancer over five years with the initial build, some hourly changes and a likely mid cycle redesign because you can't find them anymore. You're looking at around $13,250 and the nature of that cost is just pure unpredictability. You pay a chunk upfront, but the rest comes in these high stress bursts when something breaks. And finally, the agency because of that high initial cost and the consistent monthly retainers, the five year total is typically around $22,000. 22,000, the massive capital commitment for a small business. It is. The cost there is the sheer financial weight you're paying for stability. But it's a very high price. So when you look at it that way, it really shows this huge gap in the market, especially for businesses here on the central coast. It really does. The low cost option isn't low cost. The migraine option isn't secure and the high end option is just out of reach for most. So you're forced into a painful compromise. Every single path forces you to sacrifice something critical. You sacrifice your time, you sacrifice your security or you sacrifice tens of thousands of dollars. Most businesses just need something professional that works without the massive upfront risk or the constant headache. That's the core realization. The traditional market forces you to choose between being a stressed out web developer or paying huge agency fees. And we just believe that small business owners here in Eslow County deserve a better option. Something that finally closes that gap. That's the quick tip for today. If you want a professional website without the agency price tag or the DIY headache, here's the better way at you wrote out pro. We build it. We manage it and we handle every update forever for just $79 a month. And let me just emphasize what that means. There is zero setup fee, no contract. And it is strictly month to month.
[10:11]
So there is zero risk. We're local here in AG and we can have you live in days, not months. Want to see what your site could look like? Go to yougrow.pro right now and we'll design three custom mockups for your business, completely free. No strings attached. Thanks for listening and keep growing.