What a small business website actually costs.

1. The platform fee

This is the number on the pricing page. For the mainstream builders it lands somewhere between about $15 and $30 a month when you pay for a year up front, and higher if you pay monthly. Cheaper tiers exist, and they usually put the platform's own branding on your site or leave out the thing you actually needed.

Two things to check before you compare two numbers: whether the price is per month billed annually (so multiply by twelve), and whether it is an introductory rate that renews higher.

2. The domain name — and its second year

A .com is usually somewhere around $15 a year at a registrar. The wrinkle is that most builders give you the domain free for the first year with an annual plan, and then it renews at their price from year two. That is not a scam, but it does mean the number you compared at signup is not the number you pay ongoing.

The other cost here is not money. Buying a domain means choosing a registrar, making an account, and then finding the DNS section and pasting two records into it. For most people running a business this is the single most annoying hour of the whole exercise, and it is the step where projects stall for months.

3. Email on your own name

you@yourbusiness.com is almost always a separate subscription, typically a few dollars per mailbox per month, whoever you buy it from. Worth it once you are sending quotes; easy to forget when you are budgeting.

4. The add-ons

Bookings, online payments, a contact form that does not go to spam, extra storage, removing the builder's badge. Each is small. Together they are frequently more than the plan.

5. The hours, which are the real cost

A template still has to be filled in. Someone writes the words, finds the photos, decides what the three pages are, and then does it again in six months when the phone number changes. If you value your own time at anything, this dwarfs every line above — and it is why so many small business sites still show last year's hours.

Paying a designer removes the hours and replaces them with a bigger invoice and a wait. Both are legitimate choices. What is not legitimate is a pricing page that pretends the hours do not exist.

The honest comparison

Casso is not the cheapest way to have a website; the cheapest way is a free page you make yourself and never update. It is the cheapest way we know of to have a current one on your own name without spending an afternoon on DNS.

What we do not do: online stores, bookings systems, logins, or anything with a database. If you need those, a mainstream builder is genuinely the better answer and we will tell you so if you ask. What we are good at is the thing most small businesses actually need — a few clear pages that are correct today, changeable by email, and reachable at a name that is yours.