THAT COSTS AS MUCH AS A CAR!
I remember the first time I pitched a $60,000 web project to a client. It was 2013, I was running my first digital consultancy from a cafe-cum-bar in the Mission district, and my business partner thought we were crazy. “That’s more than a car! How could a website cost that much?” I don’t remember the project or whether the client signed, but over the course of the next decade and a half, selling 6-figure web projects to mid-market organizations became routine. Our team couldn’t touch a project below $15K; with designers, programmers, project managers, and other specialists involved, that small of a budget offered zero room for error. If someone with a small business came to us, we’d point them towards Wix or Squarespace, recommend they find a good independent consultant, and wish them good luck.
”You Should Just Use Squarespace”
A couple months ago, a friend referred me to his pilates instructor. She runs a small studio in the city and was looking to revamp her Wix website and get off her studio management SaaS. My old reflex would have been clear: politely decline and recommend she find a Wix specialist.
But in 2026, my assumptions about what makes sense for businesses — small and enterprise alike — are shifting fast.
Ye Olden Days
Not long ago (we’re talking two years), I’d expect a website to be a 5+ year investment. A business owner would shell out a grand or two to an Upwork freelancer to get the job done on whatever SaaS platform was trending. Their priorities were straightforward:
- Get to the top of Google
- Convince visitors you’re legit and have a strong brand
- Avoid a blackhole of developer fees, bugs, and SaaS support queues
Most small and mid-sized businesses wanted more — marketing automation, deeper integrations, smarter operations — but those capabilities were largely out of reach without enterprise-level budgets. You satisfied yourself with basic e-commerce, scheduling, and limited automation at best.
Fast forward to 2026, and those assumptions have reshuffled considerably.
SEO Is Now AEO
First, SEO is undergoing its biggest transformation since its inception. Your audience is increasingly AI: you need your business to surface as a direct recommendation or trusted source when someone asks an AI assistant a relevant question. That means building websites that aren’t just attractive to humans, but legible and authoritative to the bots that be.
Web Development Is Dirt Cheap
Second, custom web development costs just fell through the floor. A $20/month Claude Code subscription lets you produce a nearly unlimited number of well-designed websites — work that rivals what top digital agencies were charging $20K+ for two years ago. And if you have a bit of technical literacy (or a modicum of patience), that math holds up.
Maintenance has followed the same curve. In the old days, agencies like mine obsessed over CMSs like Drupal and WordPress to help clients manage content “without a developer.” The reality was messier — customization mostly meant publishing more blog posts, not redesigning anything, and things broke in ways that still required developer intervention.
Now, if you want to fix something or overhaul a section of your site, you just ask. Design, development, copywriting — even where AI can’t do the whole job, it gets you close enough that a little ingenuity closes the last 10% gap.
”Custom” Websites Are Now Competitive
With these tools, I can confidently recommend that a small neighborhood pilates studio — or a growth-stage SaaS company — ditch their templated website and move to a framework like Astro.js or any number of solid static site builders. Built AI-first, a website like this will:
- Be better designed and more on-brand
- Be easier to optimize for AEO
- Be cheaper to maintain (you prompt, the AI fixes or extends it faster than you could drag things around in Wix)
- Be more performant and cheaper to host (a free Netlify account will likely outperform any SaaS platform)
- Be easier to extend for marketing automation, e-commerce, and business operations
If you’re wondering what this looks like in practice for your business, I’m happy to talk through it.
Making the Voyage from Ye Olde World
Most of us in tech — with a year or more of hands-on AI experience — are still internalizing what these tools make possible. We’re on the boat crossing over from the old world. Many of our clients, colleagues, and collaborators are still standing at the gangplank. Some of them, having used AI chat tools, sense the potential. They believe a better future is out there. But they’re basing it on headlines, not firsthand experience — they haven’t seen the spires of the new land themselves.
And even those of us on the ship are getting an imperfect view. We can see the promised land, but from the rolling deck of a ship still at sea. It’s hard to translate that vision into words convincing enough to get the folks back home to pack their bags.
Colonies in the New World
Over the coming months and years, the colonies we’re building in this AI-first world will grow into metropolises. The old world will become a memory — “remember when we used to…” stories told to colleagues who never knew any different.
In the meantime, whether you’re running a Fortune 500 or a neighborhood pilates studio, my advice is the same: revisit your assumptions about what a website is and how it should be built in 2026. We’ve hit the first of many inflection points, and whatever you build today may look different a year from now — but the cost of building, maintaining, and extending your technology will be lower than it’s ever been.
Curious how Switchback approaches this for clients? Explore our work or get in touch — I’d love to compare notes.