Ask what a website costs and the honest answer is a range so wide it sounds evasive: a few hundred dollars a year at one end, tens of thousands at the other, for something a customer cannot tell apart in a screenshot. The range is real. What separates the ends of it is not design talent, and it is not how many pages of code somebody wrote.
Four things are bundled into one number
Every website quote is really four purchases stapled together, and quotes become comparable the moment you pull them apart.
- The platform and the hosting. The recurring cost of the thing being online at all. This is the most predictable line and the smallest one.
- The build. Design, layout, page construction. Usually quoted once.
- The content. Photography, product and brand information, service descriptions, anything written specifically about your business rather than about fireplace retail in general. This is the line dealers underestimate by the widest margin.
- The ongoing work. Updates, promotions, new brands, hours changes, security patching, and whoever answers when a form stops sending.
A $3,000 quote and a $30,000 quote frequently cover different sets of those four. Neither party is lying. They are answering different questions.
The floor is a subscription, and it is published
The bottom of the market is not a mystery, because the platforms publish their rates.
As of September 2026, Squarespace lists four plans on annual billing at $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month, or $25, $39, $65 and $139 on monthly billing, each including a custom domain free for the first year. Wix lists its premium plans from about $17 a month up to about $160. Those are real numbers you can check in thirty seconds, and they represent a genuine option: a dealer who builds the site personally, writes the copy personally, and takes the photographs personally can be online for a few hundred dollars a year.
What that price buys is the software. It does not buy the twenty hours a week for six weeks that it takes to fill it, and that time is the actual cost of a do-it-yourself site. For an owner whose alternative use of those hours is selling stoves in September, it is rarely the cheap option it appears to be.
Page count is the single biggest driver
This is the part that never comes up in a sales conversation and explains most of the spread.
A hearth dealer's website is not a brochure. Every manufacturer you are authorized for deserves a page, because a homeowner who has decided on a specific brand searches for that brand and a dealer, not for "fireplace store." Every service you sell deserves a page for the same reason. Every town you actually serve is a separate search with separate competitors.
The hearth, stone and outdoor living sites we have built run from 22 pages to 138. Both ends are correct for the businesses they belong to. A single-location shop carrying four brands and selling three services is a genuinely smaller job than a supplier with two locations, eleven product categories and a trade audience as well as a retail one. Any quote that does not start by asking how many brands you carry has not begun costing your website yet.
So the useful question is not "what does a website cost." It is "how many pages does my business need, and what does this quote include per page."
What else moves the number
- Photography. Manufacturer photography is free, available to every dealer who carries the line, and already on eleven other sites in your state. Photographs of your showroom and your installs are the only images on a hearth site that no competitor can also use.
- Whether anything measures a lead. A site with no call tracking reports a fraction of what it produced. Across three hearth retail accounts we measured over a full year, six or seven of every eight leads arrived by phone, and a form-only site counts none of them. We went through what that measurement involves in call tracking for showroom retailers.
- Whether the content is yours or a template's. Template copy about "quality craftsmanship since 1987" ranks against every other dealer using the same template.
- Migration. Replacing an existing site means keeping the URLs that already rank, which is work that is invisible in a mockup and expensive to skip.
Three contract questions that matter more than the price
These are worth more than any line item, and every one of them should be answered in writing before a deposit.
- Who owns the domain name? Not who manages it. Whose name is on the registration. If the answer is the vendor's, the business does not control its own address.
- Who owns the site itself, and what happens if you leave? Some arrangements are a purchase and some are a lease. Both can be reasonable. Only one of them lets you take the site with you, and the difference changes what the monthly figure actually means.
- Who has the logins? Analytics, Search Console, the domain registrar, the hosting account. A dealer who cannot get into their own analytics cannot check anyone's work, including ours.
A vendor who answers all three quickly and in writing is telling you something useful about how they operate generally.
How to compare two quotes
Compare the three year total, not the build price. It is the only comparison that survives contact with reality.
A $2,000 build with $200 a month of hosting and management is $9,200 over three years. A $12,000 build with $150 a month is $17,400. A subscription platform at $29 a month on annual billing is $348 a year and $1,044 over three, plus whatever the owner's time is worth. Write the three numbers down and the conversation changes character immediately, because you are now comparing the same thing.
Then ask each vendor the same follow-up: what does year two look like. A build price with no answer to that question is not a quote, it is an opening figure.
What we think the right answer usually is
For most independent hearth and outdoor living retailers, the site is not the expensive part of marketing and it should not be treated as the whole of it. A site that is well built and then left alone will lose to a worse site that gets a new brand page when the dealer picks up a new line.
That is the reason we do not sell websites on their own. The site is the thing every other channel points at, so it has to be right, and then it has to keep being right as the business changes. What it should cost is whatever it takes to have a page for every brand you carry, a page for every service you sell, photographs of your own building, and a phone number somebody is counting.
If you want a second opinion on a quote in front of you, send it over. We will tell you which of the four purchases it covers and what is missing, whether or not it ever turns into a conversation about us.