Startup website: the fastest and cheapest way

You have an idea, a few first conversations, and a list of thirty things to finish before your first customer. The website sits somewhere around number four and reliably eats the time meant for one through three.

This article works through the part nobody writes down: not just what each route costs, but how many of your hours it takes. That second number changes the ranking.

Fast and cheap are two different questions

Both words appear in every pitch, but they do not mean the same thing, and for a startup the answers split.

Fast does not fail at the building. A draft page exists in twenty minutes. The bottleneck is deciding what it should say, and no tool answers that for you. Clear a Saturday, start without the three sentences that matter, and you will end the day with a good-looking page full of placeholders.

Cheap is not the same as free. The routes with the lowest price tag are exactly the ones that charge you in hours.

Three decisions hold whichever route you pick:

1. Your own domain, on day one. Five to twenty euros a year. You can switch tools later, but not the address, not without losing something.
2. Do not invent the structure. Find three sites that work in your field and take their build order. Where the legal line runs is a section of its own further down.
3. The words come from you. Structure, design and hosting have become commodities. Your sentences have not.

The four routes if you build it yourself

AI website tools

You describe in a few sentences what you do and who for. A model builds the first draft, and you ask for changes in chat instead of clicking them. €0 to €25 a month, first version in one to three hours.

The advantage that matters more to a startup than the price: you can rewrite your entire positioning in an afternoon. If a sales call tells you your promise is not landing, the new version can be live the same evening.

Where it breaks down: the first draft is good enough that people leave it alone. The generated copy is grammatically flawless and completely interchangeable. Fail to replace it and you have a site that looks like ten others in your field. And the category ends where real application logic begins, meaning logins and your own database.

Website builders

Wix, Squarespace, Jimdo, Webflow. Visual editor, hosting included, €10 to €30 a month on a business plan. Forget the free tier as a company: someone else's subdomain and, on some plans, injected ads. Budget 10 to 30 hours before you are willing to show the site to anyone. The providers are compared in detail in our website builder comparison.

Where it breaks down: twice. The hours disappear into nudging spacing rather than writing, and that goes unnoticed for a long time because it feels like progress. Then there is lock-in: there is no clean export. Three years in you have paid around a thousand euros and own nothing you could take with you.

WordPress or another CMS

Free software on hosting you rent, plus a theme for the design and plugins for everything else. The software costs nothing, the rest does: hosting €5 to €15 a month, a usable theme €50 to €80 once, then three to five plugins at €50 to €100 a year each. Year one lands at €400 to €600 quickly, and the full breakdown is in what a WordPress website really costs.

Getting to a first version takes 25 to 50 hours, because first you learn four concepts that have little to do with each other: theme, plugin, block editor and page builder. The moment most people give up is realising some settings live in the theme and others in a plugin.

What it is still the best answer for: when your website is more than content. Member areas with real roles, your own data models, a shop with variants and stock, booking logic with resources and availability.

Where it breaks down: maintenance. An hour and a half a month sounds like nothing and adds up to a paid working month over three years. Worse, it does not arrive on schedule. It arrives when an update breaks something, which in practice is the day before the pitch. What it costs to hand that off is in what website maintenance really costs.

An agency project

From about €1,500, and more like €3,000 to €8,000 for something genuinely custom, plus €30 to €80 a month for care. 4 to 12 weeks of calendar time, of which 5 to 10 hours are yours for the brief, feedback rounds and, above all, the copy. Nobody writes that for you unless you explicitly buy it.

Where it breaks down: almost always on timing. You are buying a snapshot of your positioning, and in year one that snapshot rarely survives six months. Once every copy change needs a request, here is what happens: you skip it. The site visibly ages while you know it is wrong. So get two answers in writing before you sign. Can I change copy and prices myself afterwards? And what does a small change cost after launch?

Copy the site you like. But only the right part.

The fastest way to a website that does not look like a template is not creativity. It is this: find three to five sites you think are good and take them apart to see why they work.

What you may take, and should, is the thinking behind them:

• The order of the sections. In what order does the page answer the questions in a visitor's head? That is the real value of a good website, and that order is free.
• The page structure. How many pages there are, what sits in the navigation, where the call to action goes and how often it repeats.
• The pattern of the headings. Does the first line name a problem or an offer? How long are the paragraphs, how many concrete numbers do they contain?
• Broad layout principles. One column or three, generous white space or dense, wide images or small.

What you may not take:

• Photos and graphics. Protected by copyright. And if they came from a stock library, the licence is issued to the site's owner, not to you. "It was freely available online" has never once worked as a defence.
• Copy. Taken word for word it is a clear infringement. Reworded it becomes a grey area you do not need to enter, because your own words convert better anyway.
• Logo, brand name, tagline. That is trademark rather than copyright, and the response tends to be a lot faster.
• The whole look, one to one. Individual layout ideas are free. A site that differs from its template only in the company name can count as unfair imitation.

In practice: treat the reference as a blueprint, not as raw material. With AI tools you can now say it literally: "Build me a page with the same structure as this one, but for an accountant in Bristol, and use this copy." The structure comes from the reference, the content from you. Two weeks of concept work becomes an hour.

One side effect people underrate: when you follow a site that demonstrably works in your field, you inherit its assumptions about what customers need to know before they buy. That is market research somebody else paid for.

Two limits, though. Do not use your direct competitor down the road, not for legal reasons but because the same customers will see both sites. And pick references from fields where trust is the product: law firms, clinics, B2B software. That is where the most thought has gone into structure.

The number that appears on no invoice

Now for the part that reverses the order of the options.

Run the sums: WordPress is free. Hosting at eight euros a month, a decent theme at sixty euros once, three plugins on annual licences. After three years your bank statement shows around €800. It looks like the cheapest option.

Now the other column: 40 hours to get the first version standing, because first you have to learn what separates a theme from a page builder. Then an hour and a half a month for updates, backups and hunting the plugin that broke the contact page. Over three years that is 94 hours. At a notional €50 an hour: €4,700.

Which makes the cheapest option the second most expensive, and it has taken two and a half working weeks you needed for sales calls.

The interesting column is the fourth, not the fifth. Multiply it by what your hour is worth and the table reads differently. To run it on your own numbers, use the website cost calculator.

The fifth route: hand the website over

Every stage of a startup has work only you can do and work somebody else does better and faster. Sales, product and the first customers belong in the first group. A website that works, gets found and brings in enquiries belongs in the second.

There is now a model built for exactly that: the web agency as a service. Instead of a project with a sign-off and silence afterwards, it runs as a subscription: you say what you need and it happens. The speed comes from AI, the decisions and the checking come from people.

At ShiftPress that looks like this in practice. You see the first draft for free before you decide. After that setup is €250 once, and you choose how much you want to hand over:

• Base, €29 a month. Domain, hosting, SSL, forms, visitor numbers, version history. You make changes yourself in chat, up to ten a month. For a site that should simply keep running and stay secure.
• Premium, €42 a month. From here we do the work: changes live the next working day, any number of tasks, two new articles a month, new subpages at no extra charge, visibility in Google and in AI assistants, three languages, website chat and appointment booking.
• Growth, €83 a month. For startups where the website is the main route to new business: changes the same working day, eight articles a month, design changes included, conversion work against one agreed goal, CRM connection, Google Business Profile looked after.

Over three years that is €1,300 to €3,250, which is more than an AI tool you drive yourself. In exchange your hours nearly disappear, and two things are included that you rarely get to buy alongside: ongoing work on visibility and on conversion. The site stays yours throughout, code included, and moving to another provider is possible at any time.

What this is not the answer to: if you enjoy building it yourself, take an AI tool and keep the money. If your website is really an application, with logins, your own database and a lot of domain logic, you need development rather than a managed site. And if you do not yet know what you are selling, build the first version yourself and hand it over once it is worth something.

If you do it yourself: the Saturday

A realistic run-through for when you have nothing on Friday night.

The first hour goes on the domain: short, no hyphens. The second and third go on three sentences: which problem, who for, what should happen on the page. That is the hardest part of the day and the only part no tool takes off you. Do it before you open anything.

After that it moves. Pick your reference sites, describe the structure, generate the draft, drop in your own copy. Something exists by lunchtime.

The afternoon is images and polish. A photo of you by the window taken on your phone beats any stock image, because it is the only thing on the page that demonstrably belongs to you alone. Then your legal pages, a check on a real phone rather than a narrow browser window, go live, connect Google Search Console.

The last half hour matters most: send the link to ten people and ask exactly one question. Is it clear in five seconds what we do? Those answers are worth more than the polish you just skipped.

Where saving gets expensive

• On your own domain. A provider's free subdomain reads as not-a-real-business, and you lose it when you switch, along with every link that ever pointed at it.
• On real images. Stock photos of people laughing in offices signal one thing: interchangeable.
• On load time. It costs you visitors before anyone has read a word.
• On the ability to leave. Before you commit, check that you can export your content and your code.

Your legal pages belong on the list too, but they are not a cost question. There are free generators, twenty minutes, done. Put it on the launch-day list and tick it off.

And one point almost nobody has on the list: if you find you are stuck on the copy, hire a copywriter, not a designer. The words decide whether somebody enquires. The design only decides whether they stay long enough to read them.

Common questions

The bottom line

The cheapest website is not the one with the lowest monthly price. It is the one that stands up quickly, that you change the moment a sales call teaches you something, and that does not take hours your startup needs more urgently.

If you enjoy building it, start with the three sentences rather than the tool. And if you would rather work on your business, give the website to someone who runs it, makes it visible and optimises it for enquiries. Both are good decisions. The one that is not is the website nobody has touched in two years.