It depends on who builds it and what you keep paying after. A do-it-yourself builder charges a monthly subscription and costs you your evenings. A freelancer or agency bills a build fee, then hosting and every change on top. Titan is one number: free to see, $97 today (first week of hosting free), $97/month starts one week later, 30-day guarantee.
Every website quote, however it is dressed up, is made of the same four parts. The build: somebody has to write the pages, pick the pictures and put your services in order. The running costs: hosting, the domain name, the security certificate, backups. The changes: a new service, a new phone number, a price that moved. And your time, which nobody puts on the invoice but you pay all the same.
When you compare two offers, compare all four. A quote that looks cheap on the build is often dear on the changes, and a quote that looks dear on the build sometimes includes a year of everything else. The number that matters is what leaves your account over a year, plus the hours you spent.
The drag-and-drop builders are the cheapest on paper. You pay a monthly subscription, pick a template and fill it in yourself. The subscription is usually the smallest number in this whole article. The catch is the second cost: your evenings. A working owner who has never built a page will lose a good few of them getting a first version up, and most of the half-finished sites on the internet are half-finished for exactly that reason.
If you enjoy that kind of work and have the time, a builder is a fair choice. If you would rather be on a job, the subscription is not the real price.
A freelancer or an agency does the work for you and bills for the labor. The build fee is the big number you hear first, and it varies enormously with who you ask and how many pages you want. Then come the parts that are quieter: hosting each month, a fee to change anything, and a new build in a few years when the old one looks old.
The question to ask any agency is simple: what does it cost me to change my phone number next Tuesday, and how long does it take? The answer tells you more about the next three years than the build fee does.
Hosting. The domain renewal. The security certificate so the browser does not flag your site as unsafe. Backups. The "small change" that turns out to be an hour of somebody's time. None of these are large on their own, and all of them arrive after you have already said yes.
Ask for the all-in monthly figure, in writing, before you agree to anything. A serious vendor will give you one.
Titan is built to be one number. Type your business name and we build the whole site from your Google listing in 10-15 minutes. It is free to see, no card. If you want it, $97 today (first week of hosting free), $97/month starts one week later, 30-day guarantee. That covers the build, hosting, the security certificate and 50 plain-English edits a month - you type "change my hours to 7 to 5" in your dashboard and it is done. No contract; cancel any time.
There is no combined figure to work out because there is nothing else to add. What you see on the pricing page is what leaves your account. The catch, if you want to call it one, is that the site is built by software from your listing and your answers, not by a designer sitting across a table. Whether that is a problem is something you can judge for yourself, because you see the finished site before you pay.
Put both on one sheet with four lines: what I pay this month, what I pay over a year, who changes it and how fast, and can I see the finished thing before I commit. Then open a real example from each. For a trade business the example should show every service you offer on its own line, a phone number that dials from a phone, a form that reaches you, and the town you work in. If an example cannot do those four things, the price does not matter.
If you run a trade, the trade pages here show what that looks like for your work: plumber website design, HVAC website design, electrician website design and roofing website design each open the live demo for that trade. The full list is on the websites for contractors page. Open one, judge it on your phone, and you have a baseline to hold every other quote against.
Titan fits a local service business - a plumber, a roofer, a lawn crew, a garage door company - that needs a site which lists its services, shows its town, gets the phone to ring and can be changed without a phone call to a designer. If that is you, the honest move is to type your name, wait 10-15 minutes and look at the result, because it costs nothing to see and you will know in a minute whether it beats what you have.
Titan does not fit a business that needs online ordering, a booking calendar tied to staff schedules, a members area, or a design that has to match a brand book to the millimeter. It is not a custom build and it is not pretending to be one. If you need any of those, a developer or an agency is the right call and the extra cost is buying something real.
Usually it is free to start and paid to use. The common pattern is a free tier with the builder's name on your address and adverts on your page, and a monthly plan to remove them. Titan's version of free is different: the demo is free to see, and paying is only for making it your live site. Nothing is charged to look.
Because you are paying for a person's hours. A designer writing your pages, choosing pictures and meeting you twice is real work at a real hourly rate. The builder gives you the tools and lets you do those hours yourself. Titan is a third thing: software does the hours, so the price sits far below an agency without the evenings a builder costs you.
Hosting on a fast global network, the security certificate, automatic backups, the search-engine basics built into every page, and 50 plain-English edits a month from your dashboard. The build itself is the $97 you pay on the day you say yes, and the first week of hosting is free. There is no separate line for anything.
Type your business name and see your own site, free, before you decide anything.
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