I checked 205 web design companies to see how many publish a price

How I checked this

I want this to be checkable, so here's the whole method.

I searched "web design {city} {state}" for 24 city labels across 12 metro areas in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa. Six of those metros took more than one label. Kansas City took six — Kansas City itself, Blue Springs, Lee's Summit, and the Johnson County trio of Lenexa, Olathe and Overland Park. Springfield took three, with Nixa and Bolivar. Omaha took three, with Bellevue and Papillion. St. Louis took two with St. Charles, Des Moines two with West Des Moines, and Lincoln two with Seward. The remaining six are one label each: Columbia, Joplin, Wichita, Topeka, Lawrence and Cedar Rapids. Every label is assigned to the Census metro area it actually sits in, which is why Blue Springs is Kansas City rather than a market of its own.

That walk covered 542 search-result rows. I threw out 174 of them as directories, DIY site builders and lead-generation middlemen — Clutch, Yelp-style listings, Wix, anyone selling introductions rather than websites. What was left produced 240 records, and 35 of those were the same company appearing under more than one city, so the final sample is 205 unique companies. The 542 number counts rows, including repeats, so it doesn't reconcile cleanly against 174 + 240. I'm not going to pretend it does.

Then I opened each company's site and applied one rule.

Published means a dollar figure for their own work, visible on a public page, with no form, no call, no download. A range counts. "Starting at" counts. A price on a city landing page counts.

Not published means everything else. Specifically, three things that look like prices and aren't: a budget selector inside a lead form (that's you naming a number, not them), a quote of the general market range rather than their own rate, and a price that lives inside a downloadable PDF.

Partial is a real third category. Six companies publish a figure for something other than the site build. Five of them price the recurring work (LCGraphics, XTAPPS, Access US, M. Reed Studio, ThePixel). The sixth, JF Designs, shows only minimum-budget floors.

Fetch failed covers six sites that couldn't be read at all, through robots.txt errors, 403s, or JavaScript walls: Blue Springs Web Design LLC, Broccoli Mango Club, White Box Create, Artillery in Lincoln, Webspec in Des Moines, and SNC2 in Joplin. They're excluded from every rate rather than guessed at from a search snippet. Webspec and Artillery are prominent firms in their markets. That's a real hole in the data.

Then a second rule, applied on top of the first, and this is the one the headline turns on. A build price is the lowest positive dollar figure a publishing company attaches to producing a website that is not a per-month, per-year or per-hour rate. A package price counts. A "from" or "starting at" figure counts. The bottom of a range counts. A setup fee counts. "$0 down" doesn't, because that's a financing term and not a price. A company that publishes only a subscription or only an hourly rate has published no build price, however clearly it published that.

The clause that moves the count is the one about setup fees, so here is the working. Three companies publish a one-time fee beside a monthly plan that is really the product: Rausch Design's $799 with a $49/month plan, Heighten Creative's $1,497 with plans from $447/month, and Vertical Marketing Solutions' $800 one-time with plans from $250/month. Either all three of those are build prices or none of them are. Counting all three gives 44 companies with a published build price, a median of $1,500 and a third quartile of $3,500. Counting none gives 41, a median of $1,900 and a third quartile of $3,750. Both readings defend, and I've given you both. I count all three, because from the buyer's side that fee is what it costs to have the site made. What doesn't defend is counting some of them: an earlier draft of this post counted two of the three and got 43, which is the answer to no rule at all.

The rule then runs over every row mechanically rather than company by company, so no figure here depends on which site I happened to be looking at when I decided. Quartiles are nearest-rank — the 11th and 33rd values of 44, no interpolation.

Everything below was fetched in early August 2026. Pages change.

The count

- Publishes a price — 48, 23.4% of 205, 24.1% of the 199 readable

- Partial, priced something other than the build — 6, 2.9% and 3.0%

- No price published — 145, 70.7% and 72.9%

- Couldn't be read — 6, 2.9% of 205

48 + 6 + 145 + 6 = 205. Take out the six unreadable sites and 199 are classifiable, so 48 ÷ 199 = 24.1%.

Now narrow it to the thing you actually want, which is a price for building a website. Four of the 48 publish a recurring or hourly figure and nothing else — Norman Web Design at $175/month, Buzzcube at $750/month, Bridgewood Creative at $3,699/month, and NexLynx at $80/hour. These sit in the 48 rather than in Partial because they sell a subscription with no separate build step at all. The six Partials do sell builds and just won't price them. It's a thin line and you may draw it differently. That leaves 44 companies, 22.1% of 199, publishing a build price.

The other pieces get rarer fast:

- Any recurring price — care plan, hosting, monthly retainer: 31 of 205, 15.1%

- An hourly rate: 4 of 205, 2.0% (IDP $125/hr, NexLynx $80/hr, Better Word $75/hr, Sunset Website Design $45/hr)

- SEO priced separately: 5 of 205, 2.4%

- Build, care and SEO all published: 4 of 205, 2.0% — SEOteric, Websnoogie, Wichita Webmasters and Vertical Marketing Solutions

- All four, including hourly: 0 of 205

Plenty of shops will name one number. Nobody names all four.

What the 145 say instead, and the word doing the work is "free"

I hand-coded each non-publisher to a single primary gate — the main thing standing between you and a figure.

- Quote, proposal or "free estimate" request — 48, 33.1% of 145

- Generic contact form, "let's talk", "start a project" — 40, 27.6%

- Consultation or booked call — 34, 23.4%

- Phone or email only — 14, 9.7%

- Free audit, free website review, free mockup — 7, 4.8%

- Gated calculator or PDF download — 2, 1.4%

Read down that column and the pattern isn't "call us." It's free. Free quote, free consultation, free audit, free website review, free homepage mockup, free strategy session, free estimate. Free is the industry's price-shaped object. It costs you a phone number.

Four things turned up while I was counting that I want to show you.

Five live pages named Pricing, Our Rates or Our Packages contain no prices. Wehrenberg Design Company's pricing page says "Every Website we design is different because we customize everything to your needs. We will be happy to give you an estimate." Wichita Design Company's page is called "Our Rates" and tells redesign buyers they'll need to apply for a website analysis first. Team WTI's packages page has no numbers on it at all — the actual figures live inside two downloadable PDF flyers, which under my rule counts as not published. A sixth, Ten10 Creative, links to a pricing page that returns a 404.

Then there's the reverse move, where the only public dollar figure is one they ask you for. Five of the 145 do this. 96 Creative Labs offers "$800 - $20,000+" as a budget selector in its inquiry form. Lee Media Group's form has "Custom Website Budget — $25,000 Minimum." Nerd Rush uses $2–5k / $5–10K / $10–20K / $20K+ bands, and Thrive and Conceptualized Design do the same thing. A sixth, JF Designs, posts minimum-budget floors next to its form checkboxes; I counted that as partial rather than as a price. Lifted Logic states the mechanism plainly on its own website-cost page: "We ask questions and evaluate a client's needs, wants, and dreams. Then we work with them to determine their total budget based on ROI and lifetime budget." That's the buyer naming a price first and the seller pricing to it.

Three companies quote the industry's range instead of their own. The Turn Group tells Olathe buyers a custom website "usually falls between $2,000 and $100,000" — a 50× spread. CowboyMSP says Kansas web design "typically ranges from $1,200 to $8,000." KC Web Designer says "you should expect to pay a few thousand dollars or more for a basic WordPress website." And one more, Advanced Systemics, has a cost sentence whose numbers failed to render, so it reads literally as "in the range of to." Whose range it was, a visitor can't tell.

Eight advertise transparency while publishing nothing. Digital Division: "we create transparent quotes based on your goals — no hidden fees, no surprises." SPB Website Designs: "Transparent flat-rate pricing, no surprise invoices." 452 Digital promises "straight pricing" once you message them. None of these are lies. Every one of them is true after you get on a call. The gap is that the buyer reading the page can't use any of it yet.

I'm quoting these because they're public and they're typical. Most of these firms do good work. It's a norm, not a conspiracy.

The case for not publishing, which is better than I'd like

Scope really does vary, and this is the strongest version of the argument. A five-page brochure site and a site with a booking engine, a members area and an inventory feed are the same word and different jobs. Publishing "$2,500" for both is a promise you'll break on one of them. Agencies that do big custom builds are not being coy when they say it depends. The spread on their work is enormous. TwoTone Creative's honest sentence is "we've built websites from $8k all the way up to $200k," and I don't know how you turn that into a price table.

Then there's undercutting. Print $3,000 and the shop across town prints $2,700 for a worse product, and the buyer who only sees two numbers picks the smaller one. This is a real commercial risk and it isn't cowardice to notice it.

Anchoring low is expensive too. Publish a $750 entry price and some share of prospects who need a $6,000 build will decide you're not for them and never call. I've watched that happen to me. It's the actual cost of doing what I do.

And value pricing is a coherent position, not a dodge. If a website makes a plumber $80,000 a year, charging by the page is a strange way to price it. Agencies that price to outcomes are following a legitimate theory, not hiding.

Those arguments hold at the top of the market. At the bottom, where most small-business work actually happens, they don't. The job down there is far more standard than "it depends" implies. If you build five-page sites for local service businesses all week, you know within a few hundred dollars what the next one costs. A range with a floor and a ceiling would cost you nothing and would save every buyer an hour of their life.

The data does say one thing in their favour. Mostly this isn't concealment. Among the 145 non-publishers, the overwhelming majority have no pricing page I could find at all — not an empty one, not a "contact us for pricing" one. That's not a strategy. It's a habit.

What the published prices actually are

Here are the 44 published build prices, lowest entry point per company, sorted:

$289, 399, 497, 499, 499, 500, 650, 725, 750, 750, 750, 799, 799, 800, 800, 820, 997, 999, 1000, 1000, 1497, 1500, 1500, 1900, 2497, 2499, 2500, 2500, 3000, 3000, 3000, 3500, 3500, 3750, 3800, 4000, 4800, 5000, 5000, 5000, 5000, 8000, 9400, 10000.

- Sum $110,465 ÷ 44 = mean $2,511

- The 22nd and 23rd of 44 values are both $1,500, so the median is $1,500

- Q1 (11th value) = $750. Q3 (33rd) = $3,500

- Range $289 to $10,000 — a 34.6× spread for the same two words

By band:

- Under $500 — 5, 11.4% of 44

- $500–$999 — 13, 29.5%

- $1,000–$2,499 — 8, 18.2%

- $2,500–$4,999 — 11, 25.0%

- $5,000 and up — 7, 15.9%

That distribution is barbelled. Eighteen are under $1,000 and eighteen are $2,500 or more, with only eight in the $1,000–$2,499 middle. The mid-market — where most of this work actually gets bought — is the band nobody prints.

One caveat on the median. These are advertised floors, mixing fixed package prices, "starting at" figures, range bottoms and setup fees attached to mandatory monthly contracts. It's a fair basis for saying "$750 is below what most publishing shops advertise as their minimum." It is not a basis for saying "the average Midwest website costs $2,511." If you want my longer breakdown of what drives the real number, it's in how much a website costs in Kansas City.

Publishing a price and making it findable are two different things

Of the 48 publishers, only 15 (31.3%) have the figure at a URL a buyer would think to click — pricing, packages, plans, rates, cost. That's IDP, Straight Line, Web Design KC, Better Word, Thomas McKee, Buzzcube, Hunter Web Group, Gravitate, Fox Web Design, Jenny Laine, Team 218, 515Hosting, Vertical Marketing, Bridgewood and Heighten Creative.

The other 33 (68.8%) bury it. Big Red SEO's $3,750 is one clause inside a paragraph. Hetzel Creative's $1,500 is inside the FAQ block on a service page, not on a pricing page. Albenze's $10,000–$75,000 range is an FAQ answer. Rhonda Cosgriff's $1,000 exists only inside an article about maintenance costs, while her homepage and her Des Moines page both push a free consultation.

Count partials and 18 of 205 companies — 8.8% — have a pricing-named page that actually contains a price. Put it another way. About nine in ten Midwest web shops have no page a buyer can go to and see what things cost.

Who publishes and who doesn't

The pattern isn't geographic. Small, productized shops publish. Full-service agencies mostly don't.

In Des Moines, not one of ten established, locally headquartered agencies publishes a build price — Visionary, Juicebox, Farmboy, Spindustry, Amplimark, DWebware, Canoe There, Iowa Web Development, Sunshine and Winterset. An eleventh, Webspec, I couldn't read at all, so it isn't in that count either way. Most of the publishers in that market are solo operators or flat-rate subscription shops: Rhonda Cosgriff, Jenny Laine, 515Hosting, Bridgewood, Vertical Marketing. The clearest exception is TwoTone Creative in West Des Moines, a full agency that publishes a range anyway.

In the smaller markets the same split holds. The self-described full-service digital marketing agencies gate almost without exception, and the publishers are small studios like Gillian Tracey, kdLOVEco and YellowBug. This one comes from reading 205 sites rather than a structured field in the data, so treat it as an observation rather than a statistic.

The state-level numbers, counting only the readable sites, are Missouri 16.1% (14 of 87), Kansas 22.4% (11 of 49), Nebraska 31.0% (9 of 29), Iowa 41.2% (14 of 34). Those denominators sum to 199, not 205, because the six I couldn't fetch are four Missouri, one Nebraska and one Iowa. Only the Missouri-Iowa gap is bigger than sampling noise, and even that has a confound I'll get to. Don't read these as "Iowans are more forthcoming than Missourians." The samples are too small and the collection wasn't perfectly uniform.

What this study can't tell you

This is a convenience sample of search results. Every rate here describes companies that rank on page one for "web design {city} {state}", not "web design companies in the Midwest." A cheap, transparent shop with no SEO is invisible to this method.

The metro comparisons carry a confound I know about. Some slices excluded out-of-town firms running programmatic city landing pages; some included them. Those operators publish flat-rate tables more often than local agencies do, which could account for much of the gap between St. Louis (1 of 21) and Des Moines (13 of 28). I can't recompute a consistent local-only cut, so read the metro numbers as descriptive and nothing more. Drop Des Moines entirely and the overall rate goes from 24.1% to 35 ÷ 171 = 20.5%. The headline isn't driven by one city, but that city pulls it up about 3.6 points.

Seven of the city cuts are too small to carry a percentage, so I haven't given them one: Wichita (12), Topeka (8), Lincoln (9), Columbia (7), Joplin (8), Lawrence (7), Cedar Rapids (6).

Some of the calls are arguable. Albenze's $10,000–$75,000 FAQ range is barely a price at 7.5× spread, and I counted it. Team WTI's real prices exist but only inside PDFs, and I didn't. Move the four most debatable records the way that flatters my thesis and the count goes 48 → 45; move them the other way and it's 49. That's 22.6% to 24.6% against a headline of 24.1% — a point and a half of wobble at worst.

Four records want eyeballing before anyone quotes them. Fox Web Design's package table extracts as "$75000 / $120000 / $180000" because the cents sit in a superscript element; the only coherent reading is $750.00 / $1,200.00 / $1,800.00, and that's what I used. Creative Canvas Web publishes "Prices from $499." in its headline area and "$2499 for basic websites" in its FAQ, and I couldn't tie the $499 to any build package, so I recorded the FAQ figure — recording $499 instead would move the mean to $2,465, put six companies under $500 rather than five, and shift the median a dollar fifty to $1,498.50. Ideal HTML's page carries both "from $750" and "Affordable pricing starting at $199"; I used $750 because the $199 isn't attached to a website build. And Heighten Creative's Joplin attribution rests on a page that now redirects.

Where I sit, since you should be able to check me against my own study

Everything I charge is at /pricing, on a page called pricing, with no form in front of it.

- $750 one-time to build the site

- $49/month for care and hosting

- $250/month for local SEO, only if you want it

- $100/hour for work outside the plan

- You own the code, the domain and every account at launch

Against the sample: $750 is exactly the first quartile of published Midwest build prices. Eight of 44 companies publish lower, three publish exactly $750 (Ideal HTML, Fox Web Design, 515Hosting), and 33 publish higher. My $100/hr sits between NexLynx's $80 and IDP's $125, and there are only four hourly data points in the entire 205. My $250/month local SEO is an exact match for SEOteric's $250/month foundational SEO tier.

The closest published analogue to my whole structure is Rausch Design in Seward, Nebraska: $799 setup plus $49/month — same shape, same monthly figure. Hunter Web Group in Omaha is $799 plus $59/month, and Slide Arts in Lincoln is $999 with care from $20/month. All three are in Nebraska, which is not where I am. The closest Missouri has is Ozark Web Design in Springfield at $499 plus $15 a month for hosting, cheaper than me but hosting-only. Nobody in Missouri publishes a build-plus-care-plan pair in the $750/$49 shape, which is the actual gap I'm sitting in.

And the part that costs me: at $750 I'm cheaper than 75% of published shops, which means some of you will read that number and assume the work is worse. If your project genuinely needs a $10,000 build — heavy integrations, custom software, a real application — you should hire one of the shops that quotes that, and I'll say so on the call. I'd rather lose the job than take one I'd do badly.

What to do when you get "it depends"

Ask for a range with a floor and a ceiling and the two things that move you between them. Any shop that has done this work more than a dozen times can answer that in one sentence. If they can't, or won't, you've learned something useful for free, which is more than most of the free consultations in this study will give you.

At a glance