Web design pricing packages for freelancers and small agencies

Why quoting every project from scratch costs you money

A custom quote takes an hour or two once you count the call, the scoping, the document and the two follow ups. Win one in four and you have spent five or six unpaid hours on every sale you make. Your prices also drift. The same small service site goes out at $900 one month and $1,800 the next, and by the time the client asks why, you cannot remember.

Buyers have no anchor either. Published agency guides, all of which have a sales interest, put template builds at roughly $500 to $2,000, semi custom work at $2,000 to $7,500 and fully custom projects well into five figures. Someone who reads two of those articles arrives confused and asks you to defend a number they have no way of judging.

Fixed packages solve both problems. You publish your own anchor, you stop re-deriving the price, and the question moves from "how much" to "which one". It also changes what you sell: a one off project invoice becomes a build fee plus a monthly fee, which is the difference between starting each year at zero and starting it with revenue already booked. Remember that most small business buyers are comparing you with DIY tools as well as with other freelancers, so it is worth knowing how the developer versus website builder comparison usually plays out before you set your floor.

The structure that works: a build fee plus a care plan

Almost every package that holds up has two numbers. The build fee pays for the one off work: discovery, structure, the first draft, copy editing, launch. The care plan pays for everything that keeps costing you money after launch: hosting, the platform licence, updates, backups, monitoring, support replies and a small allowance of content edits.

Splitting them is more honest than a single flat price, because the two costs behave differently. The build is finite and you can estimate it. The care is open ended, and if you bury it in the build fee you are quietly promising free work for years.

Be fair about when a care plan is the wrong answer. A brochure site for a business that changes its prices once a year, run by an owner who is happy to email you when something breaks, does not need a monthly commitment. Offer that client an hourly arrangement with a minimum billing increment instead. A plan nobody uses is the kind that gets cancelled with a bad feeling attached, and referrals matter more than $79 a month.

What belongs in the setup fee

Write the inclusions once, reuse them in every proposal, and put the exclusions in the same document. The exclusions are what protect your margin.

Included in a typical build fee:

• Discovery call plus a written questionnaire, and a sitemap you both sign off
• First draft of the site, then your own editing pass on layout and copy
• A fixed number of stock images placed, or client photos cropped and optimised
• Enquiry forms with spam protection, and a tested thank you flow
• Mobile and tablet check on the pages in the agreed sitemap
• Basic on page SEO: page titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, sitemap submitted
• Analytics installed, SSL active, domain connected, redirects from old URLs if there was an old site
• Launch checks and a short handover video so the client can make small edits themselves

Excluded unless quoted separately:

• Copywriting from a blank page beyond an agreed word count
• Logo design, brand work, photography and video
• Bulk content entry over an agreed number of products, listings or staff profiles
• Translations and multilingual versions
• Custom code and third party integrations
• Legal page drafting or review
• Domain registration, usually $10 to $20 a year, and business email, around $7 per user per month for a mainstream mailbox at the time of writing (October 2026). Bill both to the client or have them buy their own.

What belongs in the monthly fee

A care plan is not hosting with a markup. Say exactly what the client gets, in plain sentences, including the response time you can actually hit.

• Hosting, SSL and the platform licence for their site
• Core, theme and plugin updates, with a check that nothing broke afterwards
• Backups on a stated schedule, plus a restore test at least once a quarter
• Uptime and security monitoring, and who to contact out of hours
• A monthly check of forms and broken links
• A stated allowance of content edits, for example 30 or 60 minutes a month, which does not roll over
• Response time in working days, and what counts as an emergency
• A short quarterly report: traffic, enquiries, what you changed

Agencies that publish care plan prices commonly sit somewhere between about $100 and $500 a month for a business site, with full service growth retainers well above that. The very cheap plans, under roughly $50, are almost always hosting with no included edit time, which is fine as long as you say so.

Set tiers by complexity and integrations, not page count

Page count is a poor proxy for effort. A twelve page brochure site can be a quiet afternoon once the first draft exists. A four page site with a booking calendar, staff availability, deposits and a tax rule is a week. Price the hard parts, not the page template reused twelve times.

These are the signals that should push a project up a tier:

• Bookings tied to staff, rooms or availability, and anything that takes a deposit
• Checkout, with shipping zones, tax rules, variants or a catalogue over a few dozen products
• A CRM with pipelines, lead routing or automations the client actually wants configured
• Logins: member areas, client portals, gated downloads
• Migration from an existing site, with content to move and redirects to map
• More than one language, or more than one location with its own pages
• Integrations with accounting, inventory, industry feeds or an existing booking tool
• More than two approvers on the client side, which doubles your revision rounds in practice

Here is a three plus one structure you can adapt. The fees are illustrative, built on a $75 hourly cost, and you should rebuild them with your own numbers.

Publish the first three with real numbers and the fourth as "from". The "from" tier does two jobs: it catches the complicated enquiries without you inventing a price under pressure, and it makes the Business tier look like the sensible middle.

Cap revisions in writing

There is no reliable public data on how often web projects overrun, and the agency surveys that claim a figure are selling something. The pattern is predictable anyway: unlimited revisions are paid for out of your own margin, by you, in the evening.

Put these clauses in the scope document, not just in your head:

• Count the rounds. Two rounds at the design stage and one after the build is a fair default for a small site.
• Define a round. One consolidated written list from one named approver, returned within five working days. Three emails on three days is three rounds, not one.
• Name the approver. One person signs off. Committee feedback is a change order.
• Set a content deadline. If the client has not supplied content within 30 days, the project pauses and resumes at the next available slot, with a stated restart fee.
• Price changes openly. New requests go through a change order stating cost and timeline, approved in writing before work starts, at your hourly rate with a 30 minute minimum.
• Say what happens after launch. Post launch edits come out of the care plan allowance, and anything larger is quoted. This is the sentence that saves the most arguments.

None of this has to sound defensive. "Two rounds of changes are included, and anything beyond that is $95 an hour so you stay in control of the budget" reads as professional, not mean.

Price the store, CRM and SEO as upgrades, not discounts

The temptation when a Presence client asks for a shop is to nudge them into the Store tier at a discount. Do the opposite: keep the tier price intact and sell the capability as an upgrade with its own setup fee and its own monthly line. An upgrade adds ongoing cost and ongoing support, so it needs ongoing revenue.

• Store upgrade: a setup fee for products, shipping, tax and test orders, plus an increase to the care plan for order support and payment issues.
• CRM upgrade: a setup fee for pipelines, email templates and automations, plus a monthly fee. If you are configuring an AI CRM with lead scoring, deals, tasks and invoice reminders, that is onboarding work with real value, not a checkbox.
• SEO: keep it out of the care plan. Technical hygiene belongs in care; content, links and reporting belong in a separate SEO retainer with its own deliverables.
• Marketing: email campaigns and social posting are a retainer, priced on output per month, not a free extra.

One practical check before you quote an upgrade: look at which platform plan the feature needs. On WebNewBiz, for example, the online store starts on the Starter plan and the AI CRM starts on Growth, so adding a shop or a pipeline for a client on the cheapest plan means a plan change as well as your time. Build that into the upgrade price rather than discovering it after you have quoted.

The margin maths: when a cheap flat package stops being worth doing

Work out the real hours before you decide a price is competitive. A simple small business build, honestly counted:

• Discovery call and questionnaire: 1.5 hours
• Chasing, tidying and entering client content: 3 hours
• First draft and your editing pass: 6 hours
• Copy pass and SEO basics: 2 hours
• Revisions: 3 hours
• Launch checks, analytics, handover video: 2 hours
• Sales, admin and invoicing: 1.5 hours

That is 19 hours. A $750 flat package is an effective rate of about $39 an hour before tax, software and the hours you spent on the three prospects who said no. At a $75 target the same scope needs to be priced near $1,425, or the scope needs to come down to ten hours.

Care plans fail in a quieter way, because the included edit time is the part people forget to cost. Two plans, both with the same platform cost of $15 per site per month, your time valued at $75 an hour, and card processing at Stripe's standard US rate of 2.9% plus 30 cents per domestic charge (October 2026):

The $49 plan loses money every month a client uses what you promised. It only works if you cut the included time to zero and call it hosting. The $149 plan keeps about 36%, which survives one awkward support month per year.

The same maths kills the "free website, just pay monthly" offer. Nineteen hours of build is roughly $1,425 of your time. At $54 a month of real margin you need about 26 months of retention to get it back, and a client who leaves at month twelve costs you around $770. If you want a low entry price, use a smaller setup fee plus a written minimum term of twelve months, and say plainly what happens if they cancel early. For comparison, PayPal Checkout is 3.49% plus 49 cents for US commercial transactions, with its advanced card rate at 2.89% plus 29 cents and an extra 1.5% on international payments, so your processor choice is worth a few dollars a month on every client.

What the platform costs you, and what you can charge over it

Your care plan margin is whatever sits between what the platform charges you and what the client pays. It helps to know the floor. Published US prices at the time of writing (October 2026), on annual billing:

Two things follow. First, a care plan under about $75 a month has very little room once the platform, your time and processing come out. Second, the per site platform price decides which tiers are even viable: a Presence tier at $99 a month works on a builder that costs you $15 a site and does not work on a stack that costs you $60. If you are weighing the agency programmes against each other, our guides to Duda alternatives for agencies and GoHighLevel alternatives go through the trade offs in more detail.

Billing, cadence and who collects the money

How you bill matters nearly as much as what you charge.

• Setup fee up front, or 50% up front and 50% at launch. Never all on completion, because completion is the moment a stalled client has no reason to reply.
• Care plans on card, auto renewing. Chasing $149 by invoice costs more than the margin.
• Offer quarterly and yearly. A small discount for paying yearly improves your cash position and cuts churn, and it is the easiest price increase to avoid, because you only renegotiate once a year.
• Put a price review clause in the contract. One annual adjustment with 30 days notice, in writing, saves you from carrying 2024 prices into 2028.
• Say what happens on cancellation. Who owns the domain, who owns the content, how an export works, how long you keep backups.

If you want all of this to run under your own brand, that is what a white-label platform is for. On WebNewBiz an agency builds its own packages: recurring, one off or free, billed weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, with an optional setup fee and a choice of currencies. Those packages appear on the agency's own storefront page, payments go through the agency's own Stripe or PayPal account, and clients log in to a dashboard carrying the agency's name, logo, colours and favicon on a domain like app.youragency.com, including the login page, invites, emails and invoice PDFs. The agency creates each client account, sets limits on websites, team members and features, can suspend an account, and can either log in as the client to do the work or let the client self-serve. There is a white-label website builder for agencies overview and a separate page on the white-label CRM side if you want the detail.

The honest limits are worth stating. WebNewBiz is younger and smaller than Duda, GoHighLevel or Webflow's agency programmes, with a much smaller app ecosystem and community. Agency pricing is not published, so you have to ask before you can finish your own margin sums. The AI first draft still needs your edits, your photos and your client's facts. And sites cannot be exported as files to another host: content and domains move, but the layout gets rebuilt.

Rolling it out without losing your next five enquiries

1. Write the three tiers and the "from" tier, with one sentence each on who it suits. Use your own hours, not these example figures.
2. Write one scope document listing inclusions, exclusions, revision rounds and the change order rate. Reuse it every time.
3. Cost your care plans up from platform, time and processing, then set the price. If a tier does not clear 30% margin, raise it or cut the included time.
4. Publish the prices, or at least the "from" figures. Hidden prices mean more calls with people who were never going to buy.
5. Test on the next five enquiries before you refine anything. If everyone picks the cheapest tier, the middle one is not attractive enough, not too expensive.

One small thing that helps on first calls: our free AI Website Preview designs a homepage from a single sentence about the business, so a prospect can see a direction before anyone has agreed a fee. It is a cheap way to show a tier is worth its price rather than arguing about it.

Quick answers

How many web design packages should I offer?

Three named tiers plus one custom tier priced "from" a number. Two tiers makes the choice feel like yes or no. Five or more means prospects compare feature lists instead of picking, and you end up explaining the difference on a call, which is exactly the work packages were meant to remove.

Should I charge a setup fee or roll the build into the monthly fee?

Charge a setup fee. A nineteen hour build is roughly $1,400 of your time at a $75 hourly cost. If you give it away and keep about $54 a month from the care plan, you need around twenty six months of retention to break even, and you carry the loss if the client leaves in year one. If you do want a low entry price, use a setup fee plus a minimum term of twelve months in writing.

How do I set the price of a care plan?

Cost it up rather than guessing. Add your platform or hosting cost per site, the included edit time valued at your own hourly cost, card processing (Stripe is 2.9% plus 30 cents per domestic US card charge at the time of writing, October 2026) and a margin. Agencies that publish care plan prices commonly sit between about $100 and $500 a month for a business site, and the very cheap plans are usually hosting with no included edit time.

How many revisions should a package include?

Two rounds during design and one after the build is a fair default. Define a round in the contract: one consolidated written list from one named approver, returned within five working days. Anything after that goes through a change order at your hourly rate with a thirty minute minimum. Avoid offering unlimited revisions, because it is paid for out of your own margin.

What do I do when a client wants something that is not in their tier?

Sell it as an upgrade with its own setup fee and its own monthly fee, rather than discounting the tier above or absorbing the work. A store, a CRM or an SEO programme each add ongoing cost and support time, so each needs its own monthly line. Check whether the feature also needs a higher platform plan before you quote it.

Can I sell my own packages and keep the client payments?

On a white-label platform, yes. On WebNewBiz an agency builds its own packages (recurring, one off or free), picks weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly billing, adds an optional setup fee, lists them on its own storefront page and connects its own Stripe or PayPal account so client payments go to the agency. Agency pricing is not published, so you have to ask for it.

Related guides

• How to scale a web design agency without doubling your hours
• The best website builder for freelancers: 7 options compared
• How to start a web design agency with AI: a practical playbook
• The web design client onboarding process, step by step
• Monthly website care plans for clients: what to include and what to charge
• CRM for a Web Design Agency: What Small Studios Should Use

If you want to run your packages on our platform

Agency pricing is not on the site, so the next step is a conversation: talk to us about white-label and we can go through sub-accounts, your own billing and what your margin would look like at your volume. If you would rather test the build side first, the AI website builder is the same tool your clients would use, and you can start for $1 for the first month and price your tiers once you know how long a build actually takes you.