Website builders for South African small businesses

The real cost of building it yourself

Builder pricing pages quote dollars and add-ons. This is what a South African business actually pays, all in:

Add a domain at R80 to R150 a year and — the honest part — 30 to 60 hours of your time for a first build, most of it on content and the mobile layout. The step-by-step version is in how to make a website for your business.

Where builders genuinely win

This advice costs us work, so take it seriously. Build it yourself when you will genuinely edit the site often, when the business is pre-revenue and the hours are free, or when the site only has to exist so people can check you are real. A tidy Wix site you built in a weekend beats a professional site you never commissioned.

Where they lose

The three failure modes, in order of how often we see them. First, the lock-in: Wix and Squarespace have no real export, so year four of unhappiness costs you the entire build again. Second, structure: a template that crams four services onto one page cannot rank for any of them separately, and search visibility is the part self-builders most often get wrong without knowing it. Third, the half-built site: started, eighty percent there, abandoned for a year — which does more damage than no site at all.

The decision rule

Build it yourself if the hours are free and the site only has to exist. Have it built when thirty to sixty hours of your time is worth more than R2 950, when the site has to rank, or when it needs payments, bookings or anything that breaks quietly.

The cheapest honest middle is a one-page website at R2 950, and the full done-for-you comparison is in website design packages.

Where we build websites

Every build is done remotely, so the whole country is covered at the same price. We keep dedicated pages for the metros most enquiries come from: Cape Town · Johannesburg · Pretoria · Durban · Sandton · Port Elizabeth · Bloemfontein · Polokwane · Centurion · East London · Nelspruit · Pietermaritzburg · Vanderbijlpark · Somerset West · George · Stellenbosch · Paarl. The full picture — packages, prices, industries — starts on the homepage.