Ask five people what a small business website costs and you'll get five different numbers: free, twelve dollars a month, four hundred a year, three thousand dollars, twelve thousand dollars. All five are correct. They're just describing five different trades.
Start with free, because two builders offer it. Wix has a real free plan, and so does Cantrip. Neither charges a dollar to put a site online. What they charge instead is a badge in your footer pointing back to them, and on Wix, a Wix-branded subdomain instead of your own name. Fine for a hobby page. Less fine the first time a customer asks why your web address looks like that.
Skip past free and you're into the builder subscriptions. Squarespace doesn't offer a free tier at all, just a fourteen-day trial, and its cheapest paid plan runs around sixteen to nineteen dollars a month if you pay for the year up front (pay monthly and it costs more). Wix's cheapest paid tier lands around the same seventeen dollars, climbing past a hundred and fifty for the plans aimed at bigger operations. Cantrip's one paid plan is twelve dollars a month, or ten a month paid yearly. All three include hosting and a theme. None of them get you out of the next part.
WordPress looks like the cheap option, and for the first year, it kind of is. Hosting, a domain, a premium theme, and a couple of plugins for security and search add up to somewhere between three hundred and eight hundred dollars. That's genuinely less than a year of Squarespace. What that number leaves out is the hour you lose every few weeks when a plugin update quietly breaks your layout, or the afternoon spent figuring out why the contact form stopped sending email. WordPress isn't expensive so much as it's a part-time job with a $300 entry fee.
Then there's paying someone else to make the whole problem go away. A freelancer will build a real small business site for somewhere between fifteen hundred and eight thousand dollars, depending on how many pages you need and how particular you are about the details. A boutique agency starts around six thousand and keeps climbing from there. Either way, that invoice usually doesn't include the upkeep. Managed maintenance plans run another fifty to five hundred dollars a month if you'd rather someone else field the "why is my site down" call.
Line all of that up and the real question isn't which number is smallest. It's which currency you're paying in: money, or your own Saturday mornings. WordPress asks for the second one no matter how little you spent on hosting. A freelancer or an agency asks for the first, in a bigger chunk, up front. Wix and Squarespace ask for a little of both, since drag-and-drop still means you're the one dragging.
Cantrip's bet is that most small businesses would rather write a check than learn a tool or manage a contractor. Twelve dollars a month, no plugin to update, no theme code inherited from whoever built the last version of the site. It won't hand you a custom checkout flow or a members-only booking system, and if that's genuinely what the business needs, a freelancer earns their invoice. Most small businesses just need a site that says what they do and lets people reach them. That one shouldn't cost what the fear of losing a Saturday costs.