How much should you charge for a small business website?

A bakery owner asks you over the counter how much a website would cost. She wants her opening hours, a menu, some photos and a way to take orders for birthday cakes. You say "it depends", she nods politely, and you both know that wasn't an answer.

The real answer does depend, but on things you can work out in an hour. Write down what she's asking for, estimate your time for each part, add your costs, and round it to a fixed price she can say yes or no to. This article walks through that method with a worked example, the way a one-person AI agency prices its first service. It won't give you someone else's price list, because prices copied from strangers don't know your costs, your speed or your clients.

Why should you write the scope before the price?

Because the price is a number attached to a list. Without the list, the number means nothing, and the first disagreement will be about what it was supposed to cover.

A scope for a small business site answers five questions:

1. How many pages, and which? Home, menu, about, contact. Name them.
2. Who writes the words and supplies the photos? If it's you, that's real work. If it's the client, what happens when the copy arrives late?
3. What does the site need to do? Show information, take a booking, accept an order, send a form to the right inbox.
4. What does it connect to? A booking system, a payment account, a Google listing, a mailing list.
5. How many rounds of changes are included? Two is a sensible start. Say what happens after that.

The bakery's scope might read: four pages, copy written by you from a 30-minute call, her photos, a cake order form that emails the shop, two rounds of changes. Online payment for cakes is a separate item, priced separately, because it needs a payment account and more testing.

Government advice for small businesses makes a similar point from the other side. The Australian government's business.gov.au guide says to use competitors' prices as a guide but not to copy them exactly. Your scope is what makes your price yours.

How do you estimate your time?

Break the job into stages and estimate each one, including the parts that aren't building. This is where most first quotes go wrong: they count the build and forget the calls, the waiting and the changes.

Here's an example for the bakery. The hours are made up for the arithmetic; use your own.

Stage	What it includes	Example hours
Research and first call	Looking at her current listing, competitors, one call	2
Scope and quote	Writing it up, answering questions	1
Copy	Drafting four pages from the call, her edits	3
Build	Pages, order form, phone layout	4
Review and fixes	Your own checks before she sees anything	2
Client changes	Two rounds of feedback	3
Launch	Domain, going live, testing the form	1.5
Handover	A short guide, what she owns, how to reach you	1.5
Total		18

Notice how little of that is the build itself. If an AI agent writes most of the pages, the build line shrinks. The call, the copy edits, the review, her changes and the launch don't shrink much, because they need you or her. Run your checks from the same written checklist every time, so the review estimate is based on the same list.

What does it cost you to run each job?

Next, the money that goes out whether or not the client is happy. For a one-person business it's usually a short list:

• Your AI subscription and its usage. The agent runs on your account, so its cost is yours. Spread the monthly cost across the jobs you expect that month.
• Software. Design tools, a password manager, anything you pay for monthly.
• Payment fees. Payment providers such as Stripe charge a fee on each card payment rather than a monthly fee on their standard pricing. It comes off what you receive.
• Things you buy for the client. Stock photos, a paid form tool, a font licence. Either pass these on at cost, or build them into the price, and say which.

Hosting and the domain are best in the client's name and on the client's bill, so they don't sit in your costs at all.

How do you turn hours and costs into a price?

With one number you have to decide for yourself: the hourly rate your business needs. Work it out once, from the top down:

1. Decide what you want to earn in a year before tax.
2. Add a year of business costs: software, equipment, insurance, your AI subscription.
3. Estimate how many hours a year you can actually bill. Not every working hour is billable: finding clients, admin and learning take real time, so be honest with yourself here.
4. Divide the first two lines by the third. That's your minimum hourly rate.

Now price the job. Using round, made-up numbers: if your rate works out at $80 an hour, the bakery's 18 hours come to $1,440. Add costs for this job, say $60, and a margin for surprises of around 15 per cent. That lands near $1,730. Round it to a clean number, such as $1,750, and that's your fixed price.

Then look at it from her side. What is a working cake order form worth to a bakery over a year? If the answer is "much more than this", your price is comfortable. If the site is a nice-to-have for a business that gets all its orders by phone, maybe she needs a smaller first version.

That's the whole method. A one-person AI agency doesn't change it. The agent changes the hours on some lines, and you still price the outcome and the responsibility, not the minutes the build took.

What should the quote say?

One page, in the words the owner would use. She should be able to read it between customers and know exactly what she's buying.

• What she gets: the pages, the order form, two rounds of changes, a short handover guide.
• What's not included: online payment for cakes, a shop, ongoing changes after launch. Put "quoted separately" beside each.
• The price: one fixed number, and whether it includes tax.
• How it's paid: how much before you start, how much at launch, and what happens if the project pauses for a month because the photos haven't arrived.
• What she'll need to give you: photos, logins, answers to your questions by a certain date.
• After launch: a care plan price if you offer one, or a line saying changes are quoted as they come up.

Keep the quote, the deposit and the final payment in one place with her details, so you never have to search three inboxes to find what you agreed. Quotes, deposits and payments in one place saves you that search when she asks in March what the price included.

How do you handle "that's more than I expected"?

Change the scope, not the price. If she wants to spend less, offer a smaller first version: three pages instead of four, a contact form instead of a cake order form, the menu as a single page. Quote that.

Dropping the price for the same work sends the wrong message. It tells her the first number was a guess, and it makes the next quote harder. A smaller scope at your real rate keeps both of you honest, and the site can grow later once it's earning its keep.

It also helps to show her what a finished job looks like. A site you've built, reviewed and delivered to a client does more to explain the price than any paragraph in a quote.

Where Volant fits

Volant keeps each client's quote next to the facts it's based on, so an offer your agent drafts uses details you've already checked. It's built to mark a payment as received only when Stripe confirms it, so "has she paid the deposit?" has a clear answer before you start work.

Whatever you use, the order stays the same: scope first, then your time and costs, then one fixed price she can read in two minutes.