Web Design and
Development in Metro Detroit.

$0 to $150,000, honestly

What a website actually costs around here

Nobody publishes this, so here it is. Five real options in Oakland County, cheapest first, and the three that undercut us are on the list.

1. Do it yourself

   A weekend, then more weekends

   $0to $50 a month

   Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, a WordPress theme. The builders are genuinely good now and a determined owner can produce something respectable.

   What you actually spend is time, and what you usually miss is the plumbing: tracking that ties a lead to a source, a form you have tested from a phone on cell data, speed under three seconds, and listings that match your site. The site is the easy part.

   Right for you if your budget is genuinely under $1,500, or you are pre-revenue and testing whether the thing works at all. Do this instead of a bad cheap site, then read our free local SEO playbook, which matters more than the site does.

2. The $99-a-month website company

   Two weeks, then forever

   $99to $300 a month, forever

   Fast, cheap, and it looks fine. The catch is structural rather than cosmetic: it is a lease. You do not own the site, you often do not own the domain, the template is shared with hundreds of businesses, and the monthly never ends because the monthly is the product.

   Do the math over five years. $199 a month is $11,940, and at the end of it you own nothing and cannot take it anywhere.

   Right for you if you need something professional online this month and cannot spend capital. Just go in knowing what it is, and ask them the three questions in the next section before you sign.

3. A freelancer

   Two weeks to never

   $800to $3,500 one-time

   Often the best value on this list, and occasionally the worst outcome. A good freelancer will build you something genuinely nice for less than we charge. We will say that plainly.

   The risks are real though: no process, no deadline that holds, and the single most common failure. They get a full-time job and stop replying, and now nobody knows how your site works. Ask who maintains it in year two.

   Right for you if you need a good-looking brochure site, you have someone specific who has been recommended by a person you trust, and lead tracking is not the point.

4. Us Where we fit

   2 to 12 weeks, on a published date

   $2,000to $12,000 build, plus $50 to $1,000 a month

   A hand-built site with the lead system behind it: capture on every channel with the source attached, tracking that works, listings built by hand, and a report at the end of the month that says what produced what.

   You own the site, the domain, the ad account and the data from day one. Month to month, no minimum term. Every price is on this website.

   Right for you if a single new customer is worth $400 or more, you have capacity to take on more work, and you want to know where the work came from. If none of those are true, one of the options above will serve you better and we will tell you so on the call.

5. A full agency

   Four to nine months

   $25,000to $150,000

   Strategy team, brand team, UX team, content team, a research phase, and a project manager to coordinate them. For a business of real size solving a genuinely complicated problem, that structure earns its money.

   For a fourteen-person roofing company in Clarkston, most of what you are paying for is the coordination overhead of the agency itself.

   Right for you if you have multiple locations, a genuine brand problem, internal stakeholders who need managing, or you are spending enough on media that the strategy layer pays for itself.