A website you make yourself with AI costs almost nothing on the invoice. Its real price is the evenings you spend on it, the customers who can’t find you, and the website to redo a year later.
Simon FortinFounder of JustSimpleWeb
The invoice says $0.
It’s the only line of the calculation you see.
A nice saving
You made your website yourself, with AI. A few evenings, a subscription of a few dollars a month, and it’s online.
A professional would have asked you for thousands of dollars.
On paper, it’s the best decision of the year.
The lines that aren’t on the invoice
First, the evenings. A touch-up here, a text to redo there, a section that breaks when you change another one. An hour a night, three nights a week.
Your hour still has a price: the one you charge your customers.
Then there are the customers who never found you. They searched for what you do, in your city, and landed on your competitor. Since they never called you, you don’t even know they exist.
And then there’s the website to redo. A year later, it still brings in nothing. You start again, this time with someone. So you pay for the website, plus the lost year.
The calculation nobody does
Do the exercise once.
Take what a customer brings you, on average.
Multiply by the number of customers who could have written to you this month if they had found you. Even just one.
Multiply by twelve.
Add your evenings, at your hourly rate.
That amount is the real price of your free website. It appears on no invoice. It’s money that never came in.
What a website should bring in
A website isn’t a decoration expense. It works evenings, weekends, while you’re busy elsewhere.
When it’s designed so that people find you, understand you and write to you, it brings in customers without advertising. Those visits have a price when you buy them: in the United States, a dental clinic pays on average US$8 for a single click on a Google ad (WordStream, 2026). A hundred visits a month is US$800 of advertising, every month.
Seen this way, the question changes. It’s no longer “how much does a website cost?” but “how much does it bring in?”
Cutting corners
Saving at the start is often a good idea. Except when what you save is exactly what brings the money in.
Does your website bring in more than it costs? We can do the math together.