Every week I hear some version of the same line: "I'd love to get my business online, but I don't have the money for a website."
Here's the truth nobody wants to hear: you do. It costs about fifty bucks.
Not fifty bucks a month. Fifty bucks.
What fifty dollars gets you
- A domain: yourbusiness.com runs about $11 a year. That's your name on the internet.
- Hosting: free. Cloudflare Pages will put a small site online for nothing, and it's fast.
- A contact form: free. Services like Web3Forms send every form fill straight to your email.
That's a real landing page. Your name, what you do, your phone number, a way to reach you. For a lot of small shops, that's all the internet needs to know.
I just put five websites online for my own companies. The domains were the only thing I paid for to get them up.
Why I'd spend $150 instead
Fifty gets you online. A hundred more gets you help.
If you've never built a website, spend a couple months on an AI assistant, the kind that runs around $20 a month. Tell it what your business does, ask it to write the page, ask it what every button means. It'll walk you through the parts that look scary and aren't.
That's not cheating. That's having a guy in your corner who never gets tired of your questions.
Who this is for
The mom and pop shop that's been "meaning to get a website" since 2015. The kid cutting lawns who wants people to find him. The handyman whose whole marketing plan is a magnet on his truck.
You don't need an agency. You don't need a $5,000 quote. You don't need to know how to code.
You need a Saturday and the nerve to start.
The real cost
The website isn't what's expensive. Waiting is.
Every month you're not online, somebody searches for exactly what you do, can't find you, and calls the guy who took the Saturday. That's the bill nobody sends you, and it's a lot bigger than fifty bucks.
The tools are there. They're cheap or free. The only thing standing between most people and getting seen is themselves.
So stop telling me you can't afford it. You can't afford not to.