Somebody in your church has asked what a new website would cost, and the honest answer — "somewhere between nothing and forty thousand dollars" — is not something you can take to a business meeting.
So let me give you real numbers, the way I would give them to a pastor across a table. I build church websites, so I have a stake in this. I am going to try to earn your trust by being more specific than that stake would normally allow, including about the parts of this industry that overcharge.
The short answer
| What you're buying | Up front | Ongoing | First-year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Squarespace, Wix, WordPress) | $0–100 | $0–160/mo | $200–1,900 |
| Church platform (Nucleus, The Church Co, Tithe.ly) | $0–500 setup | $19–150/mo | $350–1,800 |
| Done-for-you design (mid-market firms) | $1,800–3,400 | $25–100/mo | $2,100–4,600 |
| Custom agency build | $5,000–25,000+ | $85–295/mo | $6,000–28,000+ |
| Enterprise / multi-campus | $25,000–40,000+ | $295+/mo | $28,000–43,000+ |
Most churches should be somewhere in the first three rows. If you are a congregation of a hundred and forty and somebody has quoted you eighteen thousand dollars, you are not being cheated — you are being sold a product built for a church five times your size.
What actually drives the number
Four things move a church website quote, and only one of them is design.
1. Who does the content work. This is the biggest hidden variable in every quote you will receive. Somebody has to write the "What to Expect" page, choose the photographs, get the service times right, and track down the deacons' names. If the church does it, the quote is lower. If the agency does it, the quote goes up by thousands — and the project takes longer, because they have to interview you to learn things you already know.
2. How much of it is custom. A template with your photos in it is a different product from a design drawn for your congregation. Both are legitimate. Only one of them costs what custom costs.
3. Integrations. Online giving is easy. Connecting to Planning Center, Church Community Builder, Ministry Platform, or Shelby so that your events calendar and your church management system share one source of truth — that is real engineering, and it is where agency hours go at large churches.
4. Whether anybody is on the hook afterward. A build with no support relationship is cheaper on day one and much more expensive in year three, when the contact form has silently stopped sending email and nobody knows.
The eleven costs nobody puts in the quote
This is the section I would want if I were you.
- Domain name — $12–20 a year. Small, but see the warning below about who owns it.
- Domain privacy — $0–15 a year. Without it, the registration record publishes a name, address, phone, and email. Some registrars include it free; some charge. Turn it on either way.
- Email hosting — $6–7 per person per month. Your website and your church email are separate purchases. A five-person staff on Google Workspace is around $400 a year that nobody mentioned.
- SSL certificate — usually $0 now. If a vendor is charging you $80 a year for SSL in 2026, ask why. It has been free and automatic for a decade. (If your current site shows "Not Secure" in the browser bar, that is not a pricing question, it is an emergency — visitors see a warning before they see your church.)
- Content migration — $0–2,000. Moving fifteen years of sermon archives off an old site is genuine work. Ask explicitly whether it is included, and how many items.
- Photography — $0–1,500. The single largest quality difference between church websites is not design, it is photographs. Stock images of a smiling multiethnic group who do not attend your church are worse than a good phone picture of your actual sanctuary. If you can get one Sunday of a real photographer, it will do more than another $3,000 of design.
- Copywriting — $0–3,000. See above about who does the content work.
- Online giving fees — 2–3% plus ~$0.30 per gift. This is usually the largest ongoing cost associated with your website, and it never appears in a website quote. On $200,000 of annual online giving, that is $5,000–6,000 a year. Shop it as carefully as you shop the site.
- Live streaming — $0–100 a month. YouTube is free and adequate for the great majority of churches. Paid streaming platforms buy you removal of the YouTube branding and the "recommended videos" that follow, which some churches care about a great deal and some do not care about at all.
- Change requests — $0–150 an hour. Ask what a text change costs. Ask what a new page costs. Get it in writing.
- Staff and volunteer time. Five to ten hours a month on a DIY site is the number most often cited, and it is roughly right. At any reasonable valuation of your secretary's hours, "free" WordPress is the most expensive option on this page.
The "free" that isn't
Free plans on the major builders do two things that disqualify them for a church.
They put the builder's advertising on your page, and they refuse you your own domain — your church lives at something like gracebaptist.wixsite.com/home. That URL is hard to say from the pulpit, hard to print on a sign, ranks poorly, and reads to a visitor as though the church did not think this was worth twenty dollars.
Spend the twenty dollars. Whatever else you do, buy your own domain name and put it in the church's name.
What I would tell a church of each size
Under 75 people. You need one honest page more than you need a website: who you are, when you meet, where you are, and how to reach a human. Budget $200–600 for the first year. A builder with a volunteer, or the cheapest church platform, is the right answer. Do not let anyone talk you into a five-figure project.
75–250 people. This is the range where most churches overspend or underspend badly. You need sermons, events, giving, and a "plan a visit" page — and you almost certainly do not have anybody who will maintain them. Budget $1,000–4,000 for the first year. Either a church platform or a mid-market custom build.
250–800 people. Now the integrations start mattering, because your calendar and your church management system are both being maintained and they disagree. Budget $4,000–12,000 up front. A custom build starts making sense.
800+, or multi-campus. Hire an agency. Budget $10,000–30,000 and three to four months, and put a staff member in charge of the project internally, because the reason agency projects run long is almost never the agency.
Four questions that save more money than negotiating
Negotiating a quote down ten percent is worth less than getting these four answers right.
Who owns the domain? It should be registered in the church's name, in an account the church controls, on a church email address. I have watched a congregation lose a domain they had used for eleven years because it was in a former volunteer's personal account and he had moved. Every other mistake on this page is recoverable. That one is not.
What does a change cost, and how fast? Not "unlimited updates." Specifics: how I request it, who does it, how long it usually takes, what is free and what is billed.
What do we leave with? On a hosted platform, the honest answer is usually "your content, not your site." That is fine — just know it before year four.
What happens if you get hit by a bus? Ask it kindly, but ask it. A one-person shop with no documented handoff is a real risk, and the good ones will have a real answer.
Why I don't publish a price
Fair question, since I just spent three thousand words on other people's.
I charge a one-time design fee and a monthly rate that covers hosting, updates, and support, and I quote it per church, because the difference between a church with eleven pages of existing content and one with a Facebook page is a difference in the actual work. I would rather look at your situation and tell you a real number than publish an average that is wrong for both of you.
What I will tell you is where I sit: below the custom agencies and above the platforms. If a five-figure agency quote is what you need, I am not the right call and I will say so. If $29 a month from a platform genuinely solves your problem, take it — that is a good deal and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The thing I would ask you to weigh, whoever you hire, is not the price. It is this: what does it cost, in time and in friction, to change something? Because the real cost of a church website is not the invoice. It is the four years afterward when the service times are wrong and nobody knows how to fix them, and a family looking for a church on a Saturday night decides you might not be open.
That is the expensive one. It just never shows up on a quote.
Want a read on where your current site stands before you spend anything? The free church website score checks the things visitors and Google both look for — takes about a minute, no card. If you want the vendor-by-vendor rundown, I compared fourteen church website companies here.