Cheap has two currencies: money and evenings. Every "cheapest website" list prices the first and ignores the second, which is how people end up with a $16/month site that costs them four hours a week. Here is the honest budget map, both columns filled in.
The genuinely free tier (do part of this regardless)
- Google Business Profile — free, and worth doing no matter what else you choose. It is the listing that appears on Maps and in local search. It is not a website, but for a local service business it is the single highest-value free surface on the internet.
- A Facebook or Instagram page — free, familiar, fine as a supplement. The catches: you do not control it, it looks like what it is, and an algorithm decides who sees your posts. A business that lives only on a social page is renting its existence.
Free website builder tiers
Most big builders offer a $0 plan. The trade: their ads on your pages, their branding in your address, and steady pressure to upgrade. For a hobby, fine. For a business, the ad banner quietly tells customers "this couldn't be worth $16 a month to them" — the opposite of what a website is for.
Cheap DIY: $16–$50 a month, plus you
The standard path. Real address, no ads, decent templates — and the labor is yours: writing, arranging, updating, fixing, forever. The money is cheap; the evenings are the actual bill. If you enjoy the tinkering, this is a fair deal. This guide is for people who don't.
$9 a month, operated
Our entry, stated plainly so you can compare: Spark is $9/month for a real website on its own private server slice with HTTPS, a free subdomain (or bring your own domain), and — the part that is actually different — an AI engineer aboard that builds the site from your plain-English description and keeps doing the work after: edits, fixes, new pages, forms that capture leads into private storage. The plan price is the whole price.
What Spark honestly does not include: a .com registered for you. That is Capsule at $149/year, where the .com is included in the price.
The one-minute chooser
- $0 and local: Google Business Profile today, website when you're ready.
- $0 and online-only: free builder tier, accept the ads, upgrade when it earns it.
- ~$20/month and you like building: a DIY builder.
- $9/month and you'd rather describe than build: that's us — watch it work free first.