What a hair salon website costs, line by line

Where the money actually goes

Domain and hosting

The cheap line, and the one with the widest gap between the price you are shown and the price you pay. A .com is $11.08 a year at a flat-rate registrar that charges the same to register and to renew; elsewhere it is quoted at $10 to $30 a year, and a one-dollar first year is a discount, not a price. Shared hosting is advertised at $2.99 to $7.99 a month and renews at $10.99 to $25.99 — so $47 to $126 for year one with the domain included, and $143 to $342 from year two onward. Priced as an annual line instead, shared hosting runs $80 to $250 a year and premium hosting $300 to $1,000. HTTPS should cost nothing; a separate SSL charge of $50 to $100 a year is a charge for the host's own automation.

The build

The widest line on this page, because “a salon website” describes several different purchases. Nothing at all, if you build it yourself on a free theme — a premium WordPress theme is $50 to $80 one-time. A freelancer building a custom WordPress site with mobile layout, booking setup, contact forms, basic SEO and training is $300 to $1,500 once. Salon-specialist studios publish packages: a five-page site for a solo stylist at $699, a ten-page site for a full salon at $1,299, a ten-page site with a shop at $1,899 — each carrying $69, $79 or $99 a month afterward, which is the half that disappears when people compare it to a one-off quote. A salon and spa design agency publishes $1,000 to $3,500 one-time. A full-service agency is $2,000 to $10,000 and up, and the guide quoting that range says it earns its keep mainly for multi-location chains. Genuinely custom work is a different budget again: $800 to $3,000 for design, $1,000 to $3,000 front-end, $1,500 to $4,500 back-end, $500 to $1,500 for the database, $800 to $2,500 for booking and payment integration, and $300 to $1,000 to test and launch — $4,900 to $15,500 if you buy all six.

Photographs of your own work

This is the line a salon site has that a plumber's does not, and it is what the page is actually for: nobody books a colorist off a stock photo of somebody else's hair. A local photographer shooting the room, the team and a set of finished looks is $200 to $500 for the session. A stock subscription at around $16 a month is the cheap alternative, and it shows — the same six models turn up on every salon site in the county. The practical middle is one paid session for the room and the stylist portraits, then phone photographs of finished work by the window, taken in the same spot every time so the gallery reads as one salon rather than forty. Agree the licensing before the shoot, so the same images can go on your booking profile and your social accounts without a second invoice.

Booking software, and the cut on a new client

Two charges, and the second one is what surprises people. The subscription is billed by the bookable calendar: Booksy is $29.99 a month for the first user plus $20 a month for each additional staff member; Vagaro is $23.99 a month for one bookable calendar; GlossGenius is $24 a month on annual billing for Standard, $48 for Gold and $148 for Platinum, or $28, $56 and $168 month to month; Fresha is $19.95 a month for an independent, or $14.95 per bookable team member on the team plan. Vagaro's own market survey puts salon software at $24 to $50 a month and a realistic all-in baseline for a small salon at $50 to $75. Card processing sits on top at 2.5% to 2.9% plus up to 30 cents — Booksy charges 2.49% plus $0.10 on its reader and 2.69% plus $0.30 keyed in, GlossGenius a flat 2.6%, and both add 1.5% to 1.8% to be paid out faster. Then the commission: Fresha takes 20% with a $6 minimum on a new client who books through its marketplace, and Booksy Boost takes a one-time 30% of that client's entire first visit. That is a marketing cost wearing a software invoice. Build the booking form into the site yourself instead and a WordPress plugin license is $0 to $79 a year. On a Naratake site the Hair Salon starting point already lays out services, stylists, a book page and contact, with the booking fields in place. Storefront Pro, at $79 a month or $758 a year, is the plan where bookings and online ordering go live on the published site; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them. Deposits are taken with your own live Stripe keys, so the money lands in your account rather than passing through ours, and we take no share of it. The pricing page has the rest.

Edits, and the year after launch

A salon changes its price list, its team and its opening hours more often than it expects to, and every one of those is an edit somebody has to make. Maintenance for a small salon site is quoted at $30 to $150 a month, and $200 to $500 for larger ones; a broader survey of small-business sites puts annual maintenance at $600 to $5,000. Ask what a single change costs before you sign, not after: one salon studio publishes fifteen minutes a month included, $85 an hour beyond it, $89 for an extra page and $69 for a blog post. Those are honest numbers, and they are also the arithmetic of why a site somebody else edits goes stale — a $10 price change nobody wants to pay $85 to make simply does not get made. Two exits worth knowing about if you would rather stop paying and keep the site: Storefront Pro includes the source download, and the desktop LocalSite Studio is a one-time payment that exports the project as often as you like. Whatever route you take, the test is the same — can you change a price yourself, on a phone, between clients?

Three routes to the same salon page

A builder subscription

One plan, one bill, hosting and the certificate included. Squarespace publishes $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing — $25, $39, $65 and $139 month to month — and its cheapest tier also takes 2% of transactions, which starts to matter the day you take deposits. Naratake works this way too: 40 industry starting points, of which the Hair Salon one opens with the pages a salon needs already in place — home, services, book, stylists, contact — plus 15 design styles, 111 components and 66 color sets to make it yours. Every cloud plan connects one custom domain, and published sites are served over HTTPS with nothing for you to install. Storefront is $49 a month or $468 a year. Storefront Pro is $79 a month or $758 a year and publishes live booking: deposits and payments run through your own Stripe account, Naratake takes 0% of them, and only Stripe's card fee applies. On Storefront you build and preview the whole booking flow before it goes live.

Hiring someone

You are buying judgment and hours, and $300 to $10,000 is the spread between buying mostly hours and buying mostly judgment. Get two numbers, never one: the build fee, and the price of changing a service, a stylist or an opening hour afterward. A salon's price list is the most-edited page it owns, so that second number is the one you will still be paying in year three. Ask three more things before you sign — whose name the domain is registered in, who holds the hosting login, and whether the booking history stays yours if you leave. The answers should be yours, yours, and yes.

Building it yourself

Shared hosting, WordPress, a free theme, and a booking plugin at $0 to $79 a year. Our own line items put that route at $47 to $205 for the first year; a paid theme at $50 to $80 sits on top of that, and a salon guide totaling the same shopping list with a $59 theme inside it independently lands at $72 to $210. The cash is genuinely small. The cost is your hours, and a first site is never quick — budget fifteen to forty of them, with photography counted separately. If those hours come out of a quiet Tuesday, this is the cheapest route there is. If they come out of the two weeks before you open the doors, they are the most expensive hours of your year.

Money you do not actually need to spend

• A paid seat for every stylist. Salon software bills by the bookable calendar — $20 a month per additional staff member on Booksy, $14.95 per bookable team member on Fresha's team plan — so a chair renter with their own book needs a seat and an assistant who never takes appointments does not. Count the calendars, not the payroll.
• The marketplace boost, switched on everywhere at once. A 20% fee with a $6 minimum, or a one-time 30% of a new client's entire first visit, is the price of being sent somebody. That is fair for an empty Tuesday and terrible for a Saturday that was already full. Use it on the columns that have gaps, and price it against what a full column is worth.
• Pages nobody reads. The published packages are five pages for a solo stylist and ten for a full salon, and extra pages are $89 each. A salon site does five jobs: what you do and what it costs, who does it, what the work looks like, a book-now button, and how to find you. A history page and a blog are things to add once those five are right.
• Charges that should not be on the quote at all. SSL as a line item, when the host's certificate has been free and automatic for a decade. Stock photographs of other people's hair, when your own work is the entire selling point. And a guaranteed search ranking: what actually gets a salon found is duller than any package makes it sound — a Google Business Profile with the right hours, your real photographs, and a booking link that works on a phone.

Questions people ask about the price