What Should a Band Website Cost in 2026?

Search for the cost of a band website and you will get numbers between zero and ten thousand dollars, almost all of them attached to someone who wants your money. So here is the actual arithmetic: every tier, what it lists for, what it costs after fees, and what it costs in hours. Every price below was checked in September 2026.

The short answer

Most working bands should spend between $30 and $400 a year on their website. Which end you land on depends less on the platform than on two numbers nobody puts in the marketing: how much of each sale the platform keeps, and how many hours of your life the build eats.

Why the sticker price is the least interesting number

A band website has four costs, and pricing pages only ever show you the first one. Add all four before you decide anything.

1. The subscription. The number on the pricing page — and usually the annual number, not the one you pay if you go month to month.
2. The domain. Free for the first year on most builders, then a renewal you forget about until the card declines.
3. The cut. The percentage the platform takes when a fan actually buys something, plus the card processing underneath it. This is the line that grows as you get bigger.
4. The hours. Yours. Nobody invoices you for these, which is exactly why they get ignored.

That last one decides most of these comparisons. Value your time at $20 an hour — less than a decent merch night, and well under what any of you would charge for a session — and 20 hours of fighting a template is $400 of your life. That is more than a year of almost every option on this page. The pricing page cannot charge you for those hours and cannot give them back.

Tier 1: free, and what free actually costs

Linktree has a real free plan. Carrd has a real free plan. Bandcamp costs nothing to list on. If you have no money, you have options, and none of the rest of this article is telling you to go into debt for a website.

But free platforms are not charities. They are financed by a percentage of everything you sell. Linktree charges a seller fee on its lower tiers — around 9% on the paid plans and higher on free — and that sits on top of whatever Stripe or PayPal takes. Bandcamp keeps 15% of digital sales until you have moved $5,000, then drops to 10% and stays there as long as you keep clearing $5,000 in a rolling year. Physical goods are 10%. Payment processing is separate and, in Bandcamp own words, typically runs between 4 and 6%.

Run that on a real year. Say you sell $2,000 of digital music and $1,500 of shirts and records through Bandcamp. The platform share alone is roughly $450 before processing takes its bite. That is more than a year of any subscription in this article, paid quietly, in slices, at the exact moments you were making money.

Free platforms are not free. They are financed by a percentage of everything you sell.

None of which makes Bandcamp a bad deal — it is still the best storefront in independent music, and the fee buys you an audience that shows up to browse. The mistake is treating a storefront as a website. One is where money changes hands. The other is where a stranger decides whether you are worth money at all.

Tier 2: the DIY builders

This is where most bands land, and where the pricing gets genuinely confusing, because every builder advertises the annual rate and bills a different number if you pay monthly.

The line items that show up later

• <strong>Monthly billing costs 25-35% more.</strong> Squarespace Core is $29 a month if you pay for the year and $39 if you do not. Over a year that gap is $120 — four months of the same plan.
• <strong>The free domain expires.</strong> Year two is roughly $20 through a builder. The same .com is $10.44 at Cloudflare Registrar, which sells domains at cost, against $15.88 at Namecheap and $21.99 at GoDaddy.
• <strong>Processing is always there.</strong> Even at 0% platform commission, cards cost about 2.9% + 30 cents. On a $25 shirt that is $1.03 before anything else.
• <strong>Plan creep.</strong> The feature you need in month four — a store, a members area, decent analytics — usually lives one tier up.
• <strong>Leaving costs something.</strong> Your content exports. Your design does not. Whatever you built is built inside their editor, and rebuilding it somewhere else is another 20 hours.

The hour tax

A good-looking template site is a 15 to 30 hour project for someone who has not done it before. Picking the template, fighting the layout, cropping images to the sizes it wants, discovering that the font you chose is unreadable on a phone, redoing the tour page because the built-in one cannot handle a two-night stand at the same venue. This is not a knock on anyone. It is what the work is.

And at the end of it, a template site looks like a template site. Every booker and blogger has seen that layout forty times this year. You spent 20 hours to arrive at recognizable.

Where the money goes on a $25 shirt

Percentages are abstract until you put a real object through them. Here is the same $25 shirt, sold five ways, with card processing included. Bandcamp processing is estimated at 5%, the midpoint of the 4 to 6% range they publish; everywhere else assumes a standard 2.9% + 30 cents.

The spread is $2.72 a shirt between the cheapest and most expensive route. That means Big Cartel at $15 a month pays for itself at roughly six shirts a month, and a store built into your own site pays for itself earlier than that because you were paying for the site anyway. Below that volume, the percentage platforms are genuinely the cheaper deal and you should use them without guilt.

This is the whole reason the answer to what a website should cost is not a single number. At two shirts a month, free is correct. At forty, every percentage point is a tank of gas.

Tier 3: hiring a human

Real numbers, from 2026 industry pricing data: a freelancer building on a template runs $3,000 to $8,000, and a boutique agency doing genuinely custom design runs $8,000 to $15,000. Hourly, freelance senior developers sit around $85 to $150 and freelance designers around $60 to $125, while boutique agencies bill $110 to $215 for the same roles. Clutch reported in its 2026 survey that 61% of small-business buyers spent under $10,000 on their site.

For a band, those are album-budget numbers. A $9,000 website is a record you did not make, a van repair you did not cover, or six months of rehearsal space. Sometimes it is still right — a funded record with a real campaign behind it, a label picking up the bill, or a site that is part of the art rather than a container for it. An interactive album site that only makes sense for one record is a commission, not a website, and it should be priced like one.

Before you sign anything at this tier, ask two questions. Who updates it? And what does year two cost? The failure mode is not the invoice, it is what comes after: a beautiful static site nobody on the design side is obligated to touch, so every added tour date becomes an email, a wait, and a small bill. Bands end up abandoning $8,000 sites because updating them is annoying, which is the single most expensive way to have a website.

What you are actually buying

It is worth remembering what all this infrastructure is for. Bandcamp Fridays — one day a month where the platform waives its revenue share — have moved more than $154 million to artists and labels since launching in March 2020, including $19 million in 2025 alone, with a single December 2025 event clearing $3.8 million in 24 hours.

That money moves because fans had somewhere to go that was not an algorithm. Your website is the same bet at a smaller scale: the place a person lands when they decide to stop being a listener and start being a fan. Priced against that, the gap between a $19 Carrd and a $360 custom site is not really a budget question. It is a question about how ready you are for the person who shows up.

Tier 4: the subscription middle

This is the tier we built Skip Static to sit in, so read this section with that in mind. $30 a month, custom design turned around in 48 hours, hosting and domain and merch store and EPK page and the mobile app for updating it from the van, plus a redesign every year. First 30 days free with no card, no setup fee, no design fee, and no tier to graduate into.

The comparison that matters: $360 a year is less than a year of Squarespace Core at $348 once you add the domain renewal, and dramatically less once you count the 20 hours Squarespace asks of you. It is about 4% of a boutique agency build. It is more than a $19 Carrd, and Carrd is genuinely the right answer for some people.

The honest tradeoffs: you are getting art direction, not a blank canvas, so if your band has a designer who loves this work you do not need us. If you want a hand-coded interactive album experience, that is a commission and you should hire someone for it. And if you are the kind of person who enjoys building the site, that enjoyment is worth something real and we are not going to talk you out of it.

The five-year number

Bands last longer than pricing pages assume. Run each route out five years and the ranking changes, because the routes that look cheap monthly are the ones that keep charging.

The line worth staring at is Squarespace against us: within about fifty dollars of each other over five years. Same money, minus the twenty hours, minus the template. That is the entire argument for this tier existing, and if the numbers had come out differently we would be running a different company.

Three budgets that actually work

1. The $30 year. Carrd Pro Standard at $19 plus a .com from Cloudflare Registrar at $10.44. One page, a music embed, an email form, a booking address. This is a real website and nobody should sneer at it.
2. The $200 year. Bandzoogle Standard at about $170 with the domain included, or Skip Static at $360 a year, with the first 30 days free and no card, if you would rather not build it yourself. Either way, add MailerLite, which is free to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month.
3. The $550 year. A custom site plus a real merch operation: Big Cartel at $15 a month, or Shopify Basic at $29 a month billed annually with 2.9% + 30 cents processing on top. Worth it the moment merch stops fitting in a duffel bag.

What we would tell you on the phone

1. No shows booked, no release out. Spend nothing. A Carrd or a Bandcamp page is fine. Come back when you have a date on the calendar.
2. First tour, first record. Get the domain and something custom-looking behind it. This is the moment a stranger googles you and decides, and it is the cheapest point in your career to look serious.
3. Selling merch consistently. Your website should be the storefront, not a page that links to a storefront. The percentage you are paying platforms is now bigger than any subscription you were avoiding.
4. Booking regionally, doing press. A press page that a booker can act on without emailing you first pays for itself the first time it saves a back-and-forth.

The honest case against paying anyone

If you have no shows booked, no music released, and no merch to sell, a website is not your bottleneck and no amount of it will become one. Spend the $360 on a photographer instead. Good photos make every platform you touch look better — Spotify, Instagram, the poster, the site you eventually build. A great website with bad photos still looks bad, and there is no plan tier that fixes that.

The right time to spend money on a website is the moment someone else has a reason to look for you. Before that, it is a very tidy way to feel productive.

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