The short answer

Five to fifteen thousand dollars for a professional site, built for a business that’s already established. A brochure site for a two-attorney firm or a single-location shop sits near the bottom of that. Add online booking, a members area, or a store and it climbs. You can spend far less with a builder you set up yourself, and far more with an agency that has account managers to keep busy.

What actually moves the number

Four things, mostly.

Scope, and how custom it is. Five pages for a two-attorney firm is a different job from twenty pages with a service page for every practice area. Custom design costs more than a template, and it should. A template makes you look like everyone else who bought it, and in a market this size you’ll eventually run into them.

What the site has to do. Telling your story is the baseline. Online booking, a members area, a store, intake forms, automation running behind the contact form: each one is real work and each one adds real money.

Who writes it and who photographs it. Copy and photography are the two line items people forget to ask about. If a quote looks low, check whether you’re expected to hand over finished text and finished images. A half day with a commercial photographer around St. Pete runs $500-$2,000. Good writing and real photos are usually what separates a site that books appointments from one that just sits there.

What happens after launch. That gets its own section below, because it’s the cost most quotes leave out entirely.

Is $1,500 a good price for a website?

For a template you assemble yourself, sure. For a custom build by a professional, the hours don’t fit inside that number. Something is being left out, and it’s usually the strategy, the writing, or the support after launch, because those are the parts a client can’t see missing until about month six.

Expensive isn’t automatically better either. Two $1,500 quotes can look identical on the surface and cover completely different work. Ask for the scope in writing and the gap shows up fast.

Who you can actually hire, and what each tier costs

Roughly five tiers around Tampa Bay. The gaps between them tell you most of what you need to know, and so does what each one asks you to give up.

Who	Typical cost	What you’re really buying	What you leave behind
Do it yourself (Squarespace, Wix, Weebly)	$16–39/mo	Full control, no invoice, and a site live this weekend	The SEO and the schema markup that actually get you found, and a design that looks as solid as your business really is. And there’s no way out: the site lives on their platform, so you can’t take it with you and leave.
Marketplace freelancer	$1,500–5,000	The lowest price a human will build at	Continuity. Whoever built it is gone in a month, and the next person has to reverse-engineer their work before they can touch it.
Volume WordPress shop	$2,500–6,000	Speed, and a layout they’ve built forty times before	A look that’s actually yours, and sometimes the ability to leave at all. Read the contract for who owns the site and who holds the hosting.
Independent studio (that’s us)	$5,000–15,000	A studio that knows your business by name, advises you instead of just taking orders, builds it with real craft, and is still reliably there in year three	Bench depth. One studio means a start date and a queue, not a team standing by. If you need forty pages in three weeks, we’re the wrong call.
Full-service agency	$25,000+	Strategy teams, research, and capacity for a very large build	Direct access, and a chunk of the budget to overhead. You’ll talk to an account manager, and the person doing the work is usually two steps removed from you.

We’re the fourth row. That’s a choice, not a limitation, and the fourth column is why.

Prices elsewhere in Florida track this closely. National averages you’ll read online run higher because they fold in large-agency work, and lower because they fold in the builders. Neither one is your number.

The cost most quotes leave out

A website runs on software that updates constantly, sits on a server that has to stay fast and secure, and represents a business that keeps changing. Left alone, sites don’t crash dramatically. They rot quietly. A plugin update breaks the contact form and nobody notices for three weeks. Rankings slip because nothing has been touched in a year. By the time it’s obviously broken, fixing it costs more than maintaining it would have.

So every site we build comes with a care plan. Care starts at $150 a month. Most clients land on Care+ at $300, which covers managed hosting, updates, security, backups, and real change requests handled by a person rather than a ticket queue. Budget for it the way you budget for the build. Here’s what each plan includes.

Should you build new, or redesign what you have?

If you already have a site, a full rebuild isn’t automatically the cheaper good option. A redesign that keeps the rankings you’ve already earned can cost less, and it protects traffic you’d otherwise hand back to your competitors. Which one is right comes down to how much of your current site is worth keeping, and that’s a twenty-minute conversation, not a guess.

The bottom line

Plan on $5,000 to $15,000 for a professional website in St. Petersburg or anywhere in Tampa Bay, plus a care plan to keep it working. Below that range, read carefully and find out what’s missing. Above it, ask what the extra is paying for.

If you want a real number for your business instead of a range, tell us what you’re building and we’ll give you one.

How Much Does a Website Cost in St. Petersburg? (2026)