Let's get the disclosure out of the way: we build websites for small businesses, so you'd expect us to say "hire someone" and be done with it. But that would be bad advice for a decent chunk of the people reading this. DIY builders like Wix and Squarespace exist for good reasons, and for some businesses they're exactly right.
So here's the comparison we'd give a mate at a barbecue.
When DIY is genuinely the right call
Build it yourself if most of these sound like you:
- You're validating an idea and might pivot in three months
- The business is a side hustle without steady revenue yet
- You have more time than money, and you genuinely don't mind tinkering
- Your customers all come from one channel already (a marketplace, a booking platform, word of mouth) and the website is just a business card
In those situations, spending real money on a website is premature. Throw up a clean one-pager on a builder, spend your energy on customers, and revisit it when the business is real. That's not a compromise. It's correct sequencing.
What DIY actually costs
The advertised price is $15–$30 a month. The realistic price, once you're off the ad-supported plan and have a domain and the app or two you'll inevitably need, is $30–$60 a month, comparable to having it done for you at the flat-fee end of the market. We ran the full numbers in our website cost guide.
The real bill is hours. Template shopping, editor wrestling, writing every word, resizing photos at midnight. Most owners we talk to either spent several weekends on it, or started, stalled, and have been "meaning to finish the website" for a year. That half-finished site is the most common thing we replace.
Where DIY falls over
A few failure modes come up again and again:
- It never quite gets finished. The business owner is good at their business, not at websites, so the website loses every time-priority contest, forever.
- It looks like a template. Because it is one. Your customers have seen that exact layout with different fonts a dozen times.
- Nobody's watching it. When the form silently breaks or the builder changes something, you find out from a customer, if you find out at all.
- The writing. Builders give you boxes; they don't fill them. Most DIY sites say "Welcome to our website" where they should say what the business does, for whom, and why you'd pick them.
None of these are fatal for a side project. All of them cost real money for a business where each new customer is worth hundreds or thousands of dollars.
When hiring someone wins
If you're a trade or service business where one job pays for a year of website (a plumber, an electrician, an accountant, a physio), the maths is lopsided. A site that brings in even one extra customer a month has paid for itself many times over, and every hour you spend fighting a website editor is an hour off the tools or away from clients.
Hiring someone also buys the things DIY can't: words written for you, a design that doesn't look like a template, and a human to call when something needs changing. You can see what that looks like in practice on our example work.
The middle path
The traditional choice was binary: $30 a month and do everything yourself, or thousands upfront and own the maintenance problem. Flat-fee managed websites, which is what Topos is, exist to split the difference: DIY-subscription money ($50 a month), done-for-you outcome, no upfront cost, and changes are our job instead of your weekend.
The barbecue answer
If the business is an experiment, DIY and don't look back. If the business is real and customers check you out online before they call, get it done properly, whether that's a good freelancer, a flat-fee service like ours, or (for bigger operations) an agency. The only wrong answer is the half-finished builder site quietly costing you customers while you're too busy to notice.