There are really only three ways to get a business website: build it yourself on a platform like Wix, Squarespace or WordPress; hire a freelancer; or hire a studio or agency. Most advice on this topic comes from someone selling one of the three, so it's worth hearing it from a studio willing to say plainly: DIY is sometimes the smarter choice, and we'd rather you know that than get an unhappy client six months in.
Real cost over three years
The sticker price of each option hides very different total costs once you look three years out.
- DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace): Current published plans for a proper "business" tier run roughly $23–$39 a month on annual billing. Over three years that's approximately $800–$1,400, before a custom domain (typically $15–20/year) or any paid apps for booking, forms or email. No large upfront payment, but the meter never stops — cancel the subscription and the site goes offline.
- DIY on self-hosted WordPress: More flexible, but not actually free. Realistic yearly costs — hosting, a domain, a decent theme, and a handful of essential plugins (SEO, security, backups, forms) — typically add up to roughly $300–$800 a year once you're properly equipped, so around $900–$2,400 over three years. You also become responsible for updates and security yourself, or you pay someone to.
- Freelancer: In the UK, published guides put a bespoke small-business build at roughly £1,000–£3,000, plus ongoing hosting and maintenance commonly £100–£300 a year. Over three years, that's roughly £1,300–£3,900 depending on scope.
- Studio or agency: UK guides put a small specialist agency at roughly £2,000–£10,000 for the build, with larger agencies starting well above that. Add maintenance on top. In Germany, guides for a proper small-business site — design, mobile layout, basic SEO — typically land between €1,500 and €7,500.
These figures move with your market and your scope, so treat them as orientation, not quotes — but the pattern holds everywhere: DIY has the lowest entry cost and the highest ongoing time cost, and that trade-off runs the other way for a freelancer or agency.
Time investment from the owner
This is the cost most comparisons leave out, and it's usually the deciding one for a busy owner.
DIY builder: Expect real hours — often days spread over weeks — learning the editor, choosing a template, writing every word yourself, and troubleshooting when something looks wrong on mobile. You are the designer, the copywriter and the IT support.
Freelancer: Meaningfully less of your time, but not zero. You'll brief them, supply content or answer their questions, and review a few rounds of drafts. Expect several hours spread across a few weeks, concentrated around the brief and the revisions.
Agency: Usually the least owner time per pound or euro spent, because a studio runs a repeatable process with its own project management. You still need to brief clearly and answer questions promptly — a vague brief costs everyone time, whoever builds it.
Quality ceiling
DIY builder: Templates are genuinely good-looking out of the box today, and that's exactly the problem — thousands of other small businesses are using the same templates. The ceiling is "looks professional", not "looks like nobody else's site", and technical performance (page speed, clean code) is capped by what the platform allows you to control.
Freelancer: Highly variable, because you're really hiring one specific person's skill and taste. A great freelancer can match or beat an agency; a weak one can produce something worse than a good template. The variance is the risk, not the average.
Agency: More consistent, because the output goes through more than one set of eyes — design, development, sometimes copy — before it reaches you. That consistency is what you're really paying the premium for, not just "more hours".
Ownership and lock-in
This is the point most comparisons skip, and it matters more than it seems at signup.
Wix and Squarespace are closed platforms. You don't own exportable code — you're renting space inside their system. Stop paying, or want to switch platforms later, and you're rebuilding from scratch, not moving a file. That's a real, ongoing dependency, not a one-off decision.
Self-hosted WordPress is open-source. You can move it to any hosting provider, hand it to any developer, and keep the actual files if you ever want to leave. That portability is WordPress's biggest practical advantage over the closed builders, even though it costs more of your time to run.
Freelancer or agency builds land anywhere on this spectrum depending on what platform they build on and what your contract says about ownership. This is exactly why "who owns the code once it's built?" belongs in every quote conversation, before you sign anything.
What happens when you outgrow the option you picked
This is the question worth asking before you start, not after: what does it cost to move on from this choice in two or three years, once the business has changed?
Leaving a closed DIY builder is the hardest exit of the three. Because there's no exportable code, "switching" really means rebuilding the site from a blank page on whatever comes next — none of the design work carries over, only the content and images you can copy out yourself.
Leaving self-hosted WordPress is comparatively painless, which is precisely the point of it being open-source. A new freelancer or agency can take over the existing files and hosting directly, and often reuse a meaningful part of the existing build rather than starting over.
Leaving a freelancer or agency depends entirely on what the contract says about code ownership — which is exactly why that question belongs on your checklist before you sign, not after you've decided to switch.
Who each option genuinely suits
- A DIY builder is the right answer if you're testing a new idea before committing real money, your budget genuinely can't stretch further right now, or your needs are simple and you don't mind spending real hours of your own time learning the tool. There's no shame in this — it's often the correct decision, not a compromise.
- A freelancer suits you if you want a direct relationship with the person actually doing the work, your project is small-to-medium, and you're comfortable managing the back-and-forth yourself without a project manager in between.
- A studio or agency suits you if your time is worth more to you than the price difference, you need integrations or complexity a template can't handle cleanly, or the website is central enough to the business that consistency and process are worth paying for.
The honest bottom line
None of these three is universally "better" — they solve different problems at different stages of a business. The mistake isn't picking DIY, a freelancer, or an agency. It's picking one without being honest with yourself about which resource you actually have the least of right now: money, time, or tolerance for average results.
It's also worth remembering that this isn't a decision you're locked into forever. Plenty of businesses start on a DIY builder while testing an idea, move to a freelancer once revenue justifies it, and eventually work with a studio once the site becomes central to how they get customers. That progression is normal, not a sign the earlier choice was wrong — it was usually the right choice for the business at that exact stage, and outgrowing it is a good problem to have.