An honest pricing breakdown for a church website
Setup fees, monthly retainers, and the bundled-platform tax. What you should actually expect to pay.
There are four ways to pay for a church website. Each one trades money for something else — speed, control, taste, data. Here’s what they actually cost.
1. Free, on a builder
Wix, Squarespace, Weebly. You’ll pay $20–40/mo for hosting plus a domain. Total cash outlay: ~$300/year.
What you trade: design — every site looks the same. Speed — they’re slow on mobile by default. And usually, integration — you’ll glue Planning Center, YouTube, and your mail platform together with embeds. There’s nothing wrong with this for a 30-person church plant. There’s something a little wrong with this for a 400-person established church.
2. Bundled “free,” on a church platform
Subsplash, The Church Co, Tithe.ly bundled tiers. The website looks low-cost on the invoice — sometimes literally $0/mo. The real price runs through the giving spread: typically ~2.3% + $0.30 per gift, charged on every card transaction.
For a $300k-giving church, that’s about $6,900 a year. For a $600k-giving church, it’s nearly $14,000. Compare to PCO Giving’s 2.15% card / flat-$0.30 ACH and a real custom site — the delta covers a custom build with money left over, every year, forever.
What you trade: less than nothing on the surface. Quietly: tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the church, plus design lock-in to whatever template the platform shipped.
3. Custom, on a real studio
What we do, what the studios we respect do. Setup is usually $5k–$25k depending on scope, plus a small monthly retainer for hosting, support, and maintenance.
Sunday Best, an excellent agency, charges $10k–$25k. We charge $6k–$12k for Custom, $2k–$4k for Starter, both plus retainer. We can quote at that range because the engine is reusable: the design is bespoke per church, but the underlying system was built once.
What you trade: the upfront cost. You’re swapping a recurring giving-spread cost for a one-time design cost plus a small ongoing fee. The math usually breaks even inside year two and gets better every year after.
4. Hire a developer
A part-time developer, freelance, or a member of the church. Hourly rates run $75–$200/hr depending on the developer and the geography.
This works when you’ve got a strong technical lead willing to maintain the site for years. It often doesn’t, because the developer leaves, the codebase rots, the integrations break, and three years later the church is back on a builder because nobody can touch the site without paying $200/hr.
How to choose
Honestly: by counting weeks.
- If the church is small and growing slowly, free + builder is fine. Don’t overspend.
- If giving is over $200k/year and you’re paying a bundled platform, the math says move. The custom build will pay itself off in giving savings inside two years.
- If you have a strong volunteer dev with five years of free time ahead, hire the dev — and budget for the transition when they leave.
- If you want a real custom site, the Sunday Engine, and you don’t want to manage any of it, come talk to us.
What we’d actually charge you
We’d quote it specifically. We don’t have a generic price page that ignores your situation. We do have a public range:
| Tier | Setup | Retainer | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $2,000–4,000 | $50–100/mo | 100–250 attendance, theme-customized |
| Custom | $6,000–12,000 | $100–200/mo | 200–800 attendance, full bespoke + Sunday Engine |
And we’d start with a free homepage mockup. So you can see what we’d actually build for you, before you spend a dollar. That’s how we run every project. It’s how this one would start, too.