Every price guide answers "how much is a website" with a shrug shaped like a range. The ranges are real, so here they are — and then the cost the guides never put a number on.
Building it: the one-time cost
Published 2026 figures cluster tightly:
- DIY on a builder: $0 up-front — you pay monthly instead, and you do the work.
- Freelancer: roughly $1,500–$4,000 for a basic small-business site.
- Agency: $6,000 and up, often well up.
- Across all paid paths, most straightforward small-business sites land between $500 and $5,000 to build.
Running it: the monthly cost
- Website builders (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy): $16–$50/month for a standard site; online stores run $30–$300/month.
- Self-hosted WordPress: hosting at $10–$50/month, plus you (or someone you pay) keeping plugins, themes, and PHP versions from drifting into trouble.
- Care/maintenance plans: $50–$150/month for hosting, backups, updates, and small fixes — see our breakdown of what care plans include.
- A domain: usually $11–$20/year for a .com, whoever you register with — the full domain-pricing guide is here.
The cost nobody prices: your evenings
The $16/month builder plan is not $16/month. It is $16/month plus every hour you spend in the dashboard — writing copy, nudging boxes, diagnosing why the menu overlaps the logo on your cousin's phone, and re-learning the editor each time you return to it. For a lot of owners that is the real bill, and it is why so many small-business sites quietly stop being updated: the site did not fail, the owner's patience did.
When you compare paths, compare all three columns: money up-front, money monthly, and whose hours keep it alive.
Where we land, stated plainly
OneSmallPrompt prices the whole thing as one number:
| Plan | Price | What is included |
|---|---|---|
| Spark | $9/month | website + its own private server + HTTPS + free subdomain (or bring your own domain) + your AI engineer with a monthly working allowance |
| Capsule | $149/year | everything above, a .com registered for you included in the price, and double the engineering allowance |
| Builder | $399/year | 10× allowance, checkpoints/rewind, one-click skills |
| Studio | $999/year | 25× allowance, specialist modes, scheduled work |
The plan price is the whole price — Stripe never charges more than the listed number, and the "who does the work" column reads: the engineer does. You describe changes in plain English; it makes them. If the monthly allowance runs out, your site keeps running exactly as-is and the engineer rests until the 1st.
The fastest way to sanity-check any of this is to watch a site get built from a sentence: the Machine demo is free and takes about a minute.