How much does a website cost in Sonoma County?

As of July 2026, a small-business website in Sonoma County typically costs $200 to $600 a year if you build it yourself on a site builder, $2,000 to $10,000 from a freelancer or solo professional, and $10,000 to $50,000 or more from an agency. These are market ranges I observe across the North Bay, not my own price list. The spread comes down to scope: how many pages, who writes the words, and how much strategy, photography, and follow-through is included.

What drives the price up?

Four things move a website quote more than anything else.

• Who writes the words. If you hand over finished text and photos, you pay for a build. If someone has to interview you, write the pages, and arrange photography, you pay for a small publishing project. That difference alone can double a quote.
• How many pages, and what they do. A five-page site that tells your story is one job. Online ordering, booking, payments, or a catalog of two hundred products is a different job with real ongoing costs.
• Custom design versus a starting template. A design drawn from scratch around your business costs more than a proven layout adapted to it. Both can be right. You should know which one you are buying.
• What happens after launch. Some quotes include updates, monitoring, and re-measurement for a year. Others end at launch day. A cheap build that nobody maintains often costs more by year three.

What should be included at any price?

Whatever you pay, and whoever you hire, four things belong in the deal. Missing any of them is a reason to keep shopping.

• Ownership. The domain name is registered to you, in an account you control, and the site itself is yours. If the relationship ends, you keep both. If a vendor owns your domain, they own your business's address on the internet.
• Speed. The main content of a page should appear in about three seconds or less on a phone, because past that point people start leaving. Google publishes a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that scores this. Ask for the score.
• Security basics. Every website sends browsers a set of instructions that lock out common attacks. They cost nothing to configure and are graded A through F by free public checkers. Most small-business sites send none. Ask what grade yours will get.
• The labels that tell Google and AI who you are. Behind the visible page, a site can carry plain machine-readable labels stating who you are, what you do, and where you work. Google reads them, and so do AI tools like ChatGPT when they decide who to mention. In 2026 this belongs in every build, not just expensive ones.

Builder, freelancer, or agency, honestly?

A DIY builder (Squarespace, Wix, and their cousins) is the cheapest cash outlay and a reasonable way to test a brand-new idea. The true cost is the subscription forever, the hours you spend fighting the editor, and the ceiling: the speed, security grades, and machine-readable labels described above are partly out of your hands. Fine to start. Worth outgrowing.

A freelancer or solo professional gives you the person doing the work, usually at $2,000 to $10,000 for a small-business site in this market. Quality varies more than in any other lane, so judge with evidence: ask for speed scores and security grades on sites they have already shipped, and talk to a past client. The good ones volunteer all of this.

An agency brings a team: strategy, design, development, and project management, typically from $10,000 up. For a large site, a complicated brand, or a business that needs many hands at once, that depth is real and worth paying for. For a five-page small-business site, you may be paying for structure you do not need, and you will rarely talk to the person writing the code.

None of these is wrong. The mistake is paying agency prices for builder-grade output, or expecting agency depth from a weekend freelancer. Compare quotes by what is actually included, against the checklist above. Not sure whether you need a designer or a developer in the first place? That question has its own answer.

What does Greg charge?

I do not publish prices, because an honest number depends on what your situation actually needs, and I refuse to guess in public. Here is how it works instead. You start with a free baseline reading: you send your web address, I send back five dated measurements of how your site is doing, each explained in one sentence. If the evidence points to work worth doing, you get one fixed quote in writing before anything starts. No hourly meter. Every proposal includes what I recommend you not buy. And you own the domain, the site, and the content from day one.

If you are comparing me against other options in the North Bay, good. That is exactly what the ranges above are for. More about working with a web developer in Petaluma, or the full list of services.