How much should you charge for a five-page website?
Multiply delivery hours by your internal hourly cost, add project expenses and a contingency for uncertainty, then divide by one minus your target margin. In this fictional project, $2,560 in planned costs supports a $3,200 fee at a 20% margin. Use the steps below to price your own scope.
Define what goes live
For a service business, the five pages are Home, Services, About, FAQ, and Contact. The client supplies approved copy, photos, and account access. You design and build in their account, connect an inquiry form, add page titles and descriptions, check the site on phones and desktops, and hand it over. Budget for one round of consolidated comments on the Home design and one round on the staging site.
Before estimating, ask who owns the copy, who approves the work, and what the form has to do. Routing inquiries to one inbox takes a different scope from connecting a sales system. Write down who pays for hosting, domains, and ongoing subscriptions.
Price the manual workflow first
This project takes 30 hours using the designer’s usual process. That includes three hours of kickoff and structure, seven of design, 13 of build and content entry, and seven for revisions, testing, launch, and handoff. At an internal hourly cost of $80, labor costs $2,400. A $120 asset allowance brings delivery cost to $2,520.
Reserve three additional hours for responsive corrections or form troubleshooting. The reserve adds $240. At a target margin of 20%, $2,760 ÷ 0.80 gives a manual target fee of $3,450. This reserves 20% of the fee after planned costs. Multiplying your cost by 1.20 would leave a margin of about 16.7%.
Account for AI cleanup before quoting
The designer expects a draft layout and responsive scaffold to replace six hours of manual work. Prompting, reviewing output, and rebuilding weak sections add three hours, and the tool costs $40 for the project. The resulting 27 delivery hours cost $2,320 including assets and the tool. Add the same $240 reserve, then divide $2,560 by 0.80 to reach a $3,200 target fee.
The client approves $3,200. A mobile layout problem uses two extra hours. With 29 actual hours and $160 in direct expenses, delivery costs $2,480 and the actual project margin is 22.5%. The designer can use that cleanup time when estimating the next similar job.
Re-estimate when the budget changes
If the client has $2,700 and needs inquiries above all, try three pages with a short About section on Home and the FAQs on Services. One possible estimate is 23 delivery hours, two reserve hours, and the same $160 in expenses. That scope costs $2,160 to plan and supports a $2,700 fee at 20%. Show both options with their own deliverables and review rounds so the client can choose.