What a photography website costs, line by line

The five lines behind one photography website

Domain, hosting, and the plan that replaces both

The cheap line, and the one where the price you are shown is not the price you pay. A .com is $11.08 a year to register and $11.08 to renew at an at-cost registrar, ICANN fee included — .net starts at $12.52 and .org is $11.84 — while $15 to $20 a year is what a photographer typically pays at retail. Shared hosting, if you self-host, is $2.99 to $7.99 a month, but only on a 48-month term paid upfront, and it renews at $10.99 to $25.99, so the honest yearly figure is $36 to $96 in the first year and $132 to $312 after it. A builder plan replaces this line rather than adding to it. Squarespace publishes $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing ($25 to $139 month to month); Wix publishes $19.77, $29.77, $39.77 and $159.77 on a yearly subscription paid in full; and Showit, the website builder most portfolio photographers end up on, is $27 a month for the builder alone, $259 a year at the annual entry price — about $22 a month — and $149 a month at the top, with a blog bundled at $34 or $49. Across those three, the plan is $228 to $1,917 a year. The domain is often free in year one: Squarespace annual plans include a custom domain for the first year, most Wix yearly plans include a one-year voucher, and the discounted hosting term includes one as well. HTTPS is not a line item, and a quote that charges separately for SSL is billing you for the host’s own automation.

The build

The widest line, because “a photography website” describes three different purchases. A premium template with paid customization is $1,500 to $4,000 and up: $300 to $500 for the template itself — the source quoting that range sells its own at $495 — and $500 to $2,500 and up for the work of making it yours. A freelance designer building custom is $2,500 to $8,000 and up. An agency, or a specialist who builds for photographers and nobody else, is $8,000 to $20,000 and up. Two general-market reads sit either side of that trio: one puts US web design across all business sizes at $1,000 to $30,000 and up in 2026, with larger businesses sometimes past $100,000, and another puts a small business site at $500 to $8,000 to build. Read the low ends of those two carefully — they average in five-page sites for businesses whose photographs do not have to sell anything. What moves a photographer’s number is not page count. It is whether the gallery is a grid the designer builds once or a proofing system wired to a delivery platform, whether session prices and deposits are typed into the page or pulled from a booking tool, and who swaps the portfolio out the next time you shoot something better.

The client gallery, which is not part of the website

The line a photographer has that a bakery does not, and the one most quotes leave out entirely, because it is bought separately and billed every month for as long as the studio exists. ShootProof is free for 100 photos, $10.99 a month on annual billing ($12.99 monthly) for 1,500, and up to $50 a month annually ($60 monthly) for unlimited — $132 to $600 a year — and it takes 0% commission on sales on every plan, the free one included. Pixieset is $10 a month for Basic, $20 for Plus, $50 for Pro at a terabyte and $50 for Ultimate unlimited — $120 to $600 a year — and every paid plan is commission-free. Its free plan is the trap: 3GB of storage, and 15% of every print and download sale. Sell $800 of prints in a year and that commission has cost $120, which is exactly the price of the Basic plan you did not buy. Treat the ShootProof figures as the firmer pair: they come from ShootProof’s own pricing page, while Pixieset’s page refuses automated readers, so the numbers here are read off a competitor’s comparison and deserve a check against the real page before you commit. On a Naratake site this is a genuine gap rather than a bundled feature. The Photography Studio starting point opens with a twelve-image gallery, the largest single gallery in the catalogue, four session types with a price, a length and a deposit beside each, three testimonials and a newsletter signup across four pages — and no client proofing, no download delivery, no watermarking and no print ordering. The portfolio lives on your site; delivery of the finished files still belongs to a gallery platform.

Booking, contracts, and the cut taken on the deposit

A photographer sells time before selling files, so the path from enquiry to booked shoot is a purchase of its own. HoneyBook, the client CRM most independent photographers land on, publishes Starter at $29 a month, Essentials at $59 and Premium at $129 billed monthly, and $29, $49 and $109 a month billed yearly — $348 to $1,308 a year at the yearly price. Card payments taken through it start at 2.7% plus 10¢ per transaction, and bank transfers are 1.5%, so a $250 deposit costs $6.85 on a card and $3.75 on a transfer. That percentage is this trade’s version of a platform commission, and it is a mild one; the sharper cut is Squarespace’s Basic plan, which applies a 2% transaction fee where Core and above apply none. If you would rather the enquiry and the deposit arrive on your own site, that is a plan question with us. Storefront Pro takes bookings, online ordering and quote requests live on the published site; on Storefront you build and preview them. Card payments use your own live Stripe keys — both of them, pasted in by you — so a deposit lands in your account rather than passing through ours, and we take no share of it. That is how the Photography Studio starting point charges the deposit printed beside each session.

Keeping it current, and the year-two bill

A small business site is $500 to $8,000 to build and then $600 to $5,000 a year to maintain, and the second figure is what decides whether the first was a good buy. For a photographer the maintenance is mostly portfolio: last season comes off the front page and this season goes on, and what that costs depends entirely on whether you can do it without emailing anyone. Year two is also when the discounts stop. Shared hosting bought at $2.99 to $7.99 a month on a 48-month term renews at $10.99 to $25.99 — the same server, two to four times the price. The free first-year domain from a builder or a host renews at $11.08 to $20. Every gallery and CRM subscription bills again. Add those up before you set a $2,500 freelance build against a $228 builder year, because the build is the number that stops and the rest is the number that does not. Two exits are worth knowing about if you want to stop paying a subscription and keep what you have: Storefront Pro includes the site source download, and the desktop LocalSite Studio is a one time payment with no monthly fee that exports the project as often as you like. Either way the test is the same — can you swap twelve portfolio images yourself, on a laptop, the week after a wedding?

Three routes to the same portfolio

A builder subscription

One plan, one bill, hosting and the certificate inside it. Squarespace publishes $19 to $99 a month on annual billing and Wix $19.77 to $159.77 on a yearly subscription paid in full, while Showit — the website builder photographers reach for most often — starts at $259 a year and runs to $149 a month, with a blog bundled at $34 or $49. Naratake works this way too. The Photography Studio starting point is one of 40 industry starting points, and it opens with a twelve-image gallery, the largest single gallery in the catalogue, four priced session types from a twenty-minute mini to a four-hour branding half-day with a deposit printed beside each, three testimonials and four pages, with 15 design styles, 111 components and 66 color sets behind it. Every cloud plan connects one custom domain, and published sites are served over HTTPS with nothing for you to install. What no builder settles on its own is delivery: finished files still go out through a gallery platform, and that is a separate monthly bill on every builder in this list. The other trade is that the platform sets the ceiling, so read what your plan covers before you commit; ours is on the pricing page.

A premium template you finish yourself

The middle route, and the one most working photographers actually take. A photography template is $300 to $500 as a design file — the shop publishing that range prices its own at $495 — and what arrives is a layout, not a website: your twelve images, your session prices, your words. Pay somebody to finish it and the labour is $500 to $2,500 and up, which is how this route lands at $1,500 to $4,000 and up all in. Finish it yourself and it is the template plus a builder plan, so $528 at the bottom of the plan range on this page and $2,417 at the top, plus your own hours — price those the way you price a shoot. The trap is buying the template first. A template is a frame for a set of pictures you have already chosen; bought before the portfolio is edited, it becomes a demo you slowly redecorate.

Hiring a designer or a photography specialist

You are buying judgment and hours, and $2,500 to $20,000 and up is the distance between mostly hours and mostly judgment. A freelance designer building custom is $2,500 to $8,000 and up; an agency or a photography specialist is $8,000 to $20,000 and up. Get two numbers, never one: the build fee, and the price of swapping the portfolio afterwards. A photographer changes the front page far more often than a plumber changes a service list, so that second number compounds faster in this trade than in any other — and maintenance on a small business site is $600 to $5,000 a year before anyone touches a picture. Ask three more things before the deposit: whose name the domain is registered in, who holds the login, and whether the site comes with you if you leave. The answers should be yours, yours, and yes.

Four lines you can strike off

• A free client gallery, once you actually sell something. Pixieset’s free tier is 3GB and takes 15% of every print and download sale; its Basic plan is $10 a month, $120 a year, and takes nothing. Those two cross at $800 of sales in a year — below that the free tier is genuinely free, above it you are paying a commission for the privilege of not paying $10 a month. ShootProof’s free tier holds 100 photos and takes 0% on every plan, which is a different bargain and worth knowing before you pick a side.
• A builder tier whose transaction fee is larger than the upgrade. Squarespace’s Basic plan carries a 2% transaction fee and Core and above carry none, and the ladder is $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing. Stepping off the $19 rung costs $120 a year; 2% of $6,000 of sales through the site is the same $120. Sell more than that in prints, mini sessions or gift vouchers and the cheaper plan is the more expensive one.
• A $495 template bought before the portfolio is edited. The template is the frame; twelve finished images are the argument, and publishing them costs nothing. Choose the twelve first, then buy the layout that holds them — and if it needs $500 to $2,500 of paid customization to look like your work, what you wanted was a designer.
• Charges that should not be on the quote at all. SSL as its own line, when the certificate has been free and automatic for a decade. A 48-month hosting prepayment bought for the $2.99 headline, when the renewal is $10.99 to $25.99 and the studio may not outlive the term. And a guaranteed search ranking: nobody controls the results, so nobody can promise a position. What actually gets a photographer found is duller than any package makes it sound — a Google Business Profile with the right service area, images that load fast enough to be seen, and session prices somebody can read without having to send an email first.

Questions people ask about the price