What a small business website really costs in India: our first-year bill

This site cost ₹2,999 in cash, and that covers three years. Here is every line, and why your number will probably be higher.

Most articles on this topic are written by agencies and hosting companies. They quote ranges and rarely show a bill. So here's ours.

The bill

Item	What we use	Cost
Domain, year 1	Hostinger	₹1
Domain, year 2	Hostinger	₹1,499
Domain, year 3	Hostinger	₹1,499
Hosting	Vercel Hobby plan	₹0
Code storage	GitHub	₹0
Email address	Gmail	₹0
Form answers	Google Sheets	₹0
Total for three years		₹2,999

The first-year price of ₹1 was a discount, and I paid all three years upfront. Spread out, that's about ₹1,000 a year. The normal one-year price I was shown is ₹1,499. Prices change, so check before you buy.

What this bill leaves out

The AI tool. I built this with Claude Code, on a subscription I already had. It isn't in the table. If you'd be buying one for this job, add it.

My time. Nobody paid for it, but it wasn't free.

A real database. Form answers go into a Google Sheet, and each one sends us an email. That's fine for now. It won't be fine at scale.

Why your bill will be higher

Hosting. Vercel's Hobby plan is for non-commercial use. This site is a non-commercial hobby project, so it qualifies. A clinic or shop doesn't. It would need a paid plan, or another host.

Features. This site has no booking, no payments and no WhatsApp automation. A real business usually needs at least one of them. We cover those later in the series.

How this compares

Published guides put a small business website at far more than this. Hostinger's guide says about ₹10,000 to ₹80,000, and Mayank Digital Labs says most small businesses spend ₹25,000 to ₹60,000 on a first site. Both sell related services, so read them with that in mind.

Those prices aren't a rip-off. They pay for someone else's time, design decisions and support. AI cuts the cash cost. It doesn't remove the work of deciding what the site should say, or checking that it's right.

What to do with this

Before you pay anyone, write down what your site must do. If it only needs to explain what you do and how to reach you, your cash cost can be very low. If it needs booking and payments, get those priced separately.

The next post covers exactly that list, for a psychologist's practice.