The short answer: yes, you can get a cheap website in 2026, even for under €100, as long as you build it yourself on a platform or with AI and accept what that implies: nobody to maintain it, secure it or get it to rank on Google. The real trap of cheap is the middle ground: the €500 or €1,000 site made by someone who has no time to spend on it, or the "free" site tied to a €39 monthly fee for four years. That is where you simply lose the money. The prices quoted were checked at the source on 21 September 2026.
Can you afford a cheap website?
The question runs the other way round from what people expect. Cheap makes sense while the site has no job to do yet; it gets expensive as soon as it has one. Three situations cover most cases.
You are testing a business. No clients yet, an offer still moving, a site that works as a business card so you never have to say "I don't have a website". Here, cheap is the right call: the money is better spent on your first clients than on a site you will rebuild once the offer is clear.
Your business lives on its reputation. Lawyer, architect, accountant, coach, tradesperson: the site gets visited before the first call, and the prospect compares. An amateur site does not scare everyone away, it scares away some of the people who were hesitating. One client lost per month adds up, over a year, to more than the difference between a cheap site and one made by a professional. Here, cheap is the most expensive option.
The site has to do something. Online booking, a catalogue, a client area, a link to your business software, two or three languages: that is no longer a cheap website whatever the tool, and you are better off starting from the real price ranges of a professional website in Belgium.
The methods, from free to €1,500
Five ways to get a site on a small budget, ranked by what they really cost, in the first year and over three years.
Free: the platform on its own subdomain
Wix offers a free plan with no credit card, Webflow a free Starter plan, Squarespace a 14-day trial (the three pricing pages, 21 September 2026). You assemble your pages by drag and drop and the site is live the same day. The hidden price sits in the address: yoursite.wixsite.com or yoursite.webflow.io, with the platform's banner. For a school project or a one-week test, that is enough. For a business, the address tells every visitor that you did not invest €15 in a domain name.
Under €100: your AI assistant plus a publishing service
The new option of 2026. If you already pay for Claude or ChatGPT, you can describe your site to it in conversation: it produces the pages, the first draft of the copy and the layout. What remains is putting them online, and that is the job of a service like SayLive: €99 once per site, no subscription, a 14-day trial without a card, a free subdomain or your own domain name, and files that belong to you (saylive.ai, 21 September 2026). The result is what is called a static site: fixed pages, no admin area, which your assistant edits on request. Perfect for a business card, a portfolio, a restaurant or an event page; not for integrated booking or client accounts. Lovable plays in the same league for those who want a small application rather than a site, with a free plan of 5 build credits per day (lovable.dev/pricing, same date).
€100 to €220 a year: the platform with your own domain
The classic rent. To publish on your own domain name without a banner: Wix from $17.77 per month billed yearly (Light plan, prices shown in dollars on the international page and varying by region), Squarespace from €9 per month billed yearly for Belgium (Basic plan, €108 a year), Webflow at $15 per month per site billed yearly (Basic plan). Three serious tools, each with its own character: Wix is the most guided, Squarespace the most polished on a template, Webflow the freest visually and the designers' favourite. All three share the same flaw: you are a tenant. The day you stop paying, the site disappears; the text and images can be recovered, the site cannot. Over five years, the rent of a mid-tier plan ends up costing a website. We go through that trade-off in Wix or custom website and in Webflow or Wagtail.
€300 to €1,500: the low-cost provider
This is where the money gets lost. A freelancer found on a marketplace who delivers a €400 site in three days, a template bought for €60 and filled in a hurry, or the sales formula that is very common in Belgium: the "free" site against a subscription of €30 to €50 per month, with a 36 or 48-month commitment. Do the maths: €39 per month for 48 months comes to €1,872, for a site on a template shared with hundreds of others, which does not belong to you and disappears with the contract. At that price, nobody spent time on your project: not on what you sell, not on who should call you, not on what the site should produce. Boxes were filled in.
€1,500: the same AI, in a designer's hands
The fifth method uses the same tools as the second, with one difference: someone whose job it is holds the keyboard. We come back to it below, because it is the point that changes everything.
Where you simply lose the money
Five situations keep coming back in the sites we are asked to take over.
- The site delivered without a brief. Nobody asked who it is for or what it should obtain: it presents, it does not convert. It will be rebuilt within eighteen months, and the first spend is lost
- The domain name registered to the provider. The day you want to leave, your address leaves with them, and so do the rankings you earned. Check that the domain is registered in your name, with your email address
- The rented site. Three years of rent, zero assets: at the end, you have nothing to take with you, and everything has to be redone
- The site that is never updated. Wrong opening hours, a number that no longer answers, an offer that no longer exists: a cheap site nobody maintains becomes a site that loses clients
- The site that drives people away. The invisible cost. The prospect opened three sites before choosing whom to call; yours loaded slowly on their phone, with a blurry photo and a form that never went through. They will never tell you
The common thread: doing it twice always costs more than doing it well once, and the real price of a site is measured in the clients it brings or loses, not on the invoice.
The risks the quote does not show
The low price gets paid elsewhere, and rarely on the invoice. Four risks keep coming back on the cheap sites brought to us, and the last one follows from the other three.
No maintenance. A €500 site installed on WordPress is usually a theme, a dozen plugins, and nobody to update them once the invoice is paid. That is where the holes appear: Patchstack, a WordPress security specialist, recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 91% of them in plugins (2026 report, checked on 17 September 2026). A site nobody updates opens up a little more every month.
Hacking. The logical next step. A cheap site interests no hacker in particular; it interests bots that test thousands of sites an hour for known flaws. The classic scenario: spam pages injected, a redirect to a counterfeit shop, your domain name blacklisted, your emails landing in junk folders, and the warning "This site may be hacked" under your name on Google. The €500 provider no longer answers, and the clean-up costs more than the site. Rented platforms and static sites produced with AI largely escape this risk: nothing to update, no admin area to force. The risk concentrates on the CMS installed and then forgotten.
Rankings that never take off. The cheap site goes live, then nobody touches it again: generic template copy, no page per service or per town, no Google Business profile linked, no follow-up on what Google does with it. Six months later, the site only shows up for your own name, if that. Nobody tells you, because nobody is looking.
So the site is useless. That is where the three previous risks lead. A site nobody finds, that shows wrong opening hours or that Google flags as hacked brings no client; it loses some. The low price will have saved nothing: a spend with no return, plus the cost of redoing everything.
Does AI finally make the cheap website good?
Partly, and that is new. What AI does well, alone, in an hour: the structure of a small site, a clean layout, first-draft copy, a decent mobile version. That beats most of the €500 sites delivered two years ago, and the platforms have built it in: Wix generates a site from a single prompt, Squarespace includes AI credits in every plan (10 credits once on the entry plan, then 20 to 120 per month), and the "your assistant plus a publishing service" route described above needs no extra tool at all.
What AI does not do for you: decide who the site is for, what it should obtain (a call, a booking, a quote), which promise goes at the top of the page and which one to cut. It does not take your photos, does not check that the form lands in your inbox, does not register your business on Google for local SEO, and will not update the site by itself in six months. It gives an honest starting point. What follows depends on who is steering.
The same tool, two results
Take Claude and SayLive, or Webflow, or Squarespace, and hand them to two people: a freelancer building their own site on a Sunday, and a designer who has built two hundred. The first gets a decent site. The second gets a site that has nothing in common with it, with the same tools and the same licence budget:
- A brief before the first line: for whom, to obtain what, against which competitors
- A hierarchy: one promise at the top, one proof, one call to action, instead of six sections of equal weight
- Copy half as long, written for someone reading on a phone while walking
- A photo framed and compressed rather than a stock visual your competitors use too
- A site that loads fast, works on every screen, and whose form has been tested
- A domain name in your name, clean addresses, a proper starting point for search rankings
That is why paying someone who has mastered these tools remains the best ratio between price and result, as soon as the budget exists. And it is what we put into our Solo package: a one-page site, five to six sections, generated with AI on a KernWeb base and then framed by a designer, for €1,500 excl. VAT, fixed price. One round of corrections, the domain name and first year of hosting included, the site belongs to you, live ten working days after we receive your content. It does not include an admin area (CMS), several languages, a blog, copywriting or integrated booking: when the business grows, you move to a custom site (the details are in our FAQ).
The summary
| Method | Cost in year one | Cost over three years | You own the site | Right choice if | You lose the money if |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free platform | €0 | €0 | No | Test, school project, temporary page | It is a company's website |
| Your AI assistant and SayLive | €99 (AI subscription already paid) | €99 | Yes, the files | Business card, portfolio, event | You have no time to come back to it |
| Platform with your domain (Wix, Squarespace, Webflow) | €108 to $213 | €324 to $640 | No | Self-reliant freelancer, quick launch | The site has to last five years |
| Low-cost provider, rented site | €400 to €600 | €1,400 to €1,900 | Rarely | Almost never | The contract binds you for 36 or 48 months |
| Solo (AI and designer) | €1,500 excl. VAT | €1,500 plus hosting | Yes | Freelancer whose site has to reassure | You need a blog or integrated booking |
How to choose without getting it wrong
Three simple rules.
Less than €1,500 to spend: do it yourself. A free platform to test, or your AI assistant and SayLive for a real site in your own name for €99. Do not pay anyone €500: at that price, you are buying a filled-in form, not work.
€1,500: have it done by a professional with the same tools. That is the price of a one-page site framed by a designer, which belongs to you and reassures the prospect before they call.
The site has to bring in clients: it is no longer a cheap website. Count from €5,000 excl. VAT for a professional site framed by a designer, and if your company is in Brussels, the Digitalisation grant covers 25 to 70% of eligible costs: a custom site there sometimes comes down to the price of a rented one.
Unsure which method fits? Describe your project to us: if a platform or AI is enough at your stage, we will tell you.