If you own a business in Pasco, Kennewick, or Richland and you've asked three different people what a website should cost, you've probably gotten three wildly different numbers — anywhere from $99 to $25,000. Both extremes are technically real, and both are usually the wrong answer for a Tri-Cities small business.
Here's what website pricing actually looks like in the Tri-Cities in 2026.
The short answer
For a typical small business — service company, restaurant, contractor, wellness studio — expect to pay $2,500 to $6,000 for a well-built custom site that you own. Anything less and you're on a template builder. Anything more and you're either paying agency overhead or building a much bigger site than you need.
The four price tiers
1. DIY builders — $200–$500/year
Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, Shopify. You do all the work. Fine for a placeholder or a side project. The catch is that you rent the site forever, and you inherit the builder's performance and SEO limits.
2. Freelancer on a template — $800–$2,000
Someone installs a WordPress theme, drops in your logo and copy, and calls it done. This can work, but the site usually feels like the template. Ask for links to their last three builds; if they all look like the same site with different colors, that's what you'll get.
3. Local small studio or specialist — $2,500–$6,000
This is the sweet spot for most Tri-Cities businesses. Custom design, modern stack, real performance and SEO baked in, and you own the code. Timelines are 2–4 weeks. You're working directly with the person building it — no account manager in the middle.
4. Full-service agency — $8,000–$25,000+
Worth it if you need brand identity, paid ads, content strategy, and development handled by one team. For a five-page small-business site, it's usually overkill.
What actually drives the price
- Number of unique page templates — not total pages. Ten pages using the same three templates is much cheaper than ten pages of unique layouts.
- Integrations — booking systems, payment processors, CRM connections, membership gates.
- Content — do you have copy and photos, or does the designer need to write and shoot them?
- E-commerce — even a small online store adds $1,500–$3,000 in complexity.
- SEO and AI-search readiness — schema markup, semantic HTML, per-page meta. Rare in template builds.
Red flags in Tri-Cities web quotes
- Mandatory $200+/month "maintenance" fees with no clear scope.
- You can't take your site elsewhere if you fire them.
- Vague "SEO package" add-ons with no deliverables listed.
- Timelines longer than 8 weeks for a five-page site.
What you should actually get for $2,500–$6,000
- A mobile-first custom design that doesn't look like anyone else's site.
- Fast load times (Google's Core Web Vitals in the green).
- Per-page SEO metadata and structured data (schema) so AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews can quote you correctly.
- A contact form or booking flow that actually gets you leads.
- Code and content you own.
Ballpark by business type (Tri-Cities, 2026)
- Contractor / trades (5–7 pages, gallery, quote form): $2,500–$4,500
- Restaurant or café (menu, hours, reservations link): $2,000–$3,500
- Wellness studio (services, bookings, staff bios): $3,000–$5,500
- Small e-commerce (up to ~50 products): $4,500–$8,000
- Multi-location / franchise site: $6,000–$12,000
Bottom line
Most Tri-Cities small businesses are best served by a local small studio in the $2.5k–$6k range. You get a real custom site, own the code, and can work directly with the person building it. That's exactly the range RomanThings builds in — from Pasco, WA, shipped in 2–4 weeks.