Ask three people what a church website should cost and you'll get answers ranging from "free on Wix" to "$25,000 from an agency." Both are real prices. Neither one helps you decide.
Here is the honest breakdown of what ministries actually pay in 2026, what sits behind each number, and how to pick without overspending or buying something you'll regret in eighteen months.
We put our own pricing in here too, in the same terms as everyone else's. It felt dishonest to write a pricing guide and leave ourselves out of it.
The four real options
1. DIY website builder
Typically $15–$30/month, or $200–$500 for your first year including a domain.
Squarespace, Wix, and similar tools. You pick a template, add your service times and a giving link, and you are live.
Honest take: If your congregation is under a hundred people, you have no staff, and you need a service-times page and a donate button, this is a reasonable answer. The cost you won't see on the invoice is your time. Budget twenty to forty hours learning the editor, and expect the result to look like a template, because it is one.
The bigger risk is what happens after. Sites built this way tend to go stale, not because the tool is bad, but because the person who built it got busy with actual ministry.
2. Freelancer
Typically $1,500–$5,000, one time.
A single designer builds you something custom, hands over the login, and moves on.
Honest take: Quality swings hard in both directions. The good ones do beautiful work for the money. The bad ones vanish after launch and leave you with a site nobody at the church knows how to change.
Ask one question before you hire anyone: what happens in six months when our service time changes and I need it updated? If the answer is vague, you have your answer.
3. Done-for-you ministry service
Typically $200–$500/month with little or no setup fee. Some providers, including us, charge a one-time build fee and a lower monthly instead.
Design, hosting, updates, and ongoing changes bundled together. You never touch a content editor.
Honest take: This is the right answer for most churches between fifty and a thousand people. You get a site that stays current, and the volunteer who inherited the website gets their evenings back.
The pricing inside this category varies more than the range suggests, because providers split the cost differently. A pure-monthly provider at $300/month costs you $3,600 in year one and $3,600 again every year after. A provider who charges for the build up front costs more on day one and materially less every year that follows. Neither structure is wrong. They suit different budgets.
If your church budgets annually and hates surprises, pure monthly is easier to approve. If you can cover a one-time build, the lower ongoing number compounds in your favor.
4. Agency build
Typically $8,000–$25,000 one time, plus $2,000–$5,000 a year in maintenance.
Brand strategy, custom design, photography, bespoke build.
Honest take: Justified for multi-campus churches with real brand requirements and staff to feed the process. Below a thousand people, you are mostly paying for a discovery phase you don't need.
What we charge
We sit in category three. Here are our actual numbers so you can compare them against anything else you're looking at.
Foundation — $500 build, then $57/month. We build the site and we run it. Updates, hosting, changes, all of it. You never log in unless you want to.
Growth — $750 build, then $147/month. Everything in Foundation, plus we run your social. Twelve branded graphics a month across Facebook and Instagram, batched for your approval.
Established — $1,500 build, then $349/month. Everything in Growth, plus video. Four sermon videos and thumbnails a month cut from footage you already record, and a chat widget on the site.
Year one on Growth comes to $2,514. Year two is $1,764. Compare that to a pure-monthly service at $300, which is $3,600 every year, forever.
The build fee can be paid in full, in halves, in thirds, or folded into the monthly. We would rather work out a schedule than lower the number, because the work doesn't get smaller when the price does.
What's worth paying for
- Mobile-first design. Most people who find your church will find it on a phone, often in a parking lot on a Sunday morning. A site that technically works on mobile is not the same as one designed for it.
- Speed. Slow sites lose visitors before the page finishes loading. This is a feature, not a nice-to-have.
- Updates included. Service times change. Staff change. Sermon series change. If every update costs extra, you will stop making them, and a stale site is worse than a simple one.
- Real search setup. Local schema, a sitemap, and Google Search Console configured properly, so that someone searching for a church near them can actually find you.
What isn't worth paying for
- A custom content management system. If a vendor offers to build you a proprietary backend, walk away. You will be locked to them permanently.
- Brand strategy workshops for a two-hundred-person church. That's padding.
- Animations and parallax scrolling. They looked modern once. Now they mostly slow the page down.
A sixty-second decision
- Under a hundred people, no budget. Use a DIY builder. Pick the cleanest template. Spend the saved money on something else.
- Fifty to a thousand people, want it handled. Done-for-you. Compare providers on total cost over three years, not on the monthly number alone.
- A thousand or more with a real brand. Agency. Budget five figures and three months.
For most ministries reading this, the middle option is the answer. The question is only which provider and which pricing structure fits how your church actually budgets.
How we work
You see your homepage before you pay anything. We build a free preview of your actual church, with your name and your photos, and walk you through it live. If it doesn't reflect your ministry, you don't move forward and you owe nothing.
Sites go live in fourteen days.