The choice is usually presented as cheap and awkward versus expensive and good. There is a third shape, and the useful thing is knowing which of the three your business actually needs.
In any of those cases, pay the fee. A person who does this professionally will save you more than they cost, and no automated build is going to produce a working booking system.
If you have time, some patience with software, and an eye for layout, a builder will get you a decent site for $200 to $600 a year. The honest costs are the twenty to sixty hours it takes and the fact that you are renting: the site is not yours to move.
For a brand new business testing whether an idea works at all, that is a perfectly sensible trade. Start there and move when the business is real.
Most local businesses need neither. They need one page that says clearly what they do, where they work, what it costs and how to get hold of them, looking like it was made by someone who cared, on an address they own.
That is a well-defined problem and it does not need six weeks of a person's time. Here it is $199 to build, $15 a month to host, and the address from $35 a year in your name. You see the finished site before paying, and you edit it yourself afterwards without an hourly rate.
Most ways of getting a website end with you renting one. Cancel a builder subscription and the pages stop existing; there is nothing to take with you because there was never a file. That is the trade you make for the monthly price, and plenty of people make it knowingly.
This is not that. What gets built for you is a WordPress theme: a real folder of files, with its own style.css, index.php and functions.php, that installs through Appearance, Themes, Add New, Upload Theme on any WordPress host in the world. We host it for you at $15 a month so you never have to think about it, and the web address is registered in your name, not ours.
If you ever want to leave, ask for a copy and it is yours: the theme file, the address, the content. You can hand it to any developer and they will recognise exactly what they are looking at, because it is an ordinary WordPress theme and not a proprietary export nobody else can open.
Free to look at the finished site. You pay when you want it live.
Addresses cost different amounts by ending: a .com is cheaper than a .io. We charge what the registrar charges us plus a small margin, and show the exact figure before you pay.
Yes, and it is a good order to do it in. A designer briefed against a working site with real content is cheaper and faster than one starting from a blank page and a conversation.
That is the fair question, so look at one before deciding. The design varies with the trade and the colours, and every word is yours to rewrite.
Hire someone, or use a builder with a shop built in. We do not do shops and we will tell you that rather than sell you a page with a broken checkout.
No contract and no minimum term. Hosting is monthly or yearly and can be cancelled whenever.
Free to look, and nothing to cancel if you decide against it.
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