"I was quoted $300/month for a custom website. Is that worth it compared to just building my own on Wix?" Let's do the math the way a South Florida business owner should do it — not based on what the website costs, but what it actually produces.
The Wix Scenario at $30/Month
You spend 15 hours building it yourself. At a conservative $50/hour value of your time, that's $750 in opportunity cost before the site even launches. Then the real costs start showing up:
- You're on a subdomain — you can't rank organically on Google
- You have no booking deposit system — you get no-shows, and a single missed appointment can eat $150–$400 in lost revenue
- You're processing payments through Square at 3.3% — on $10K/month in online bookings, that's $330/month in processing fees alone
- You spend 2-3 hours/month on edits, plugin updates, and template fixes (another $100-150 in time)
Your "cheap" website is actually costing you $1,100+/month in your time, no-shows, and elevated transaction fees — before counting any leads you're missing because Google doesn't rank Wix subdomains.
The $199/Month Custom Scenario
A professionally built site on your own domain. Google-optimized service pages that can rank for searches like:
- "med spa Aventura"
- "tattoo studio Fort Lauderdale"
- "AC repair Coral Gables"
- "family law attorney Brickell"
- "event venue Pompano Beach"
Plus:
- Stripe payment processing at 2.9% — $40/month cheaper than Square on $10k
- Booking deposits built into the system that eliminate no-shows
- You never touch the code — every update, every change, every fix is handled
- Sub-second load times on mobile that Google actually rewards
The Break-Even Is One New Client
For most South Florida service businesses — med spas, HVAC companies, law firms, event venues — a single new client sourced from Google search generates $200–$2,000 in revenue. If your custom website brings in just one new client per month from organic search (which is conservative once it's properly optimized), it has already paid for itself.
Every additional client that month is pure profit on a fixed $199 investment.
Industries Where This Math Works
Across the South Florida service businesses we've built for, the one-client break-even applies to almost every vertical:
The Real Question
The real question isn't whether $199/month is worth it. It's whether your current website is bringing in even one new client a month — and if not, what that's costing you in lost revenue, missed bookings, and customers your competitors are getting instead.
Most South Florida businesses we audit are losing 5-15 potential customers per month to competitors with better websites. At even a conservative $400 per lost client, that's $2,000-$6,000/month in invisible cost. Cheap websites are rarely cheap when you measure what they don't produce.
A Word On Contracts
Spartan Design Co. doesn't believe in contracts. We start at $199/month with no setup fee — if our work isn't generating value within the first 90 days, you can leave any month and keep your domain. That's the only way the relationship stays honest.