How much does a makeup artist website cost

A makeup artist website costs roughly $1,000 to $1,350 over five years if you build it yourself on the entry plan of Squarespace, Wix or Showit. Hiring me costs $500, $1,000 or $1,800 once, depending on the size of the site, plus about $11 a year for the website name. A booking app like GlossGenius includes a simple site in its plan, and Vagaro charges $20 a month extra for one

Building it yourself is the cheapest real option, and it is a fair choice. You do the design and the writing, and you can change anything whenever you like at no extra cost. What you pay a designer for is the work and the words

What a builder like Squarespace, Wix or Showit costs

These are the builders most makeup artists look at first. You pick a template, swap in your photos, write each page, and pay for as long as the site is up

• Squarespace Basic is $25 a month, or $19 a month if you pay for the year. A yearly plan includes the website name free for the first year, and after that it renews at $20 a year
• Wix Light is $17 a month, billed yearly. Light does not take payments, so if you want deposits or bookings through the site you need Core, at $29 a month
• Showit is $27 a month, or $259 a year paid up front. That is the plan without a blog, and no website name comes with it

The monthly fee buys the hosting and an editor where you can change anything, any time, for nothing extra. The cost you do not see on the pricing page is your time: choosing the template, arranging the photos and writing every page from a blank box

What a booking app website costs

If you already take bookings through an app, you may already have a website. GlossGenius includes a booking website on every plan. Its Standard plan is $28 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly, and card payments cost a flat 2.6% on top

The trade-off is the address. GlossGenius does not support your own website name, so the page lives at an address that ends in their name, and the most you can do is forward a website name you own to it. The site is part of the subscription, so when you stop paying you lose access to it

Vagaro is $30 a month for one person, and its MySite website is an add-on at $20 a month on top. I wrote a longer comparison of a GlossGenius site and a custom one

What hiring a designer costs

I build websites for makeup artists and other independent pros from Athens, Tennessee, so I can only speak for my own prices. They are public, and each one is paid once

• A one-page site is $500. Services, a gallery and a contact form on one page, for when Instagram is already doing most of the selling
• A multi-page site is $1,000. Four to six pages, a portfolio with more than one gallery, a page per service and an inquiry form
• A full build is $1,800. Everything in the multi-page site, plus a dashboard where inquiries land and contracts go out to be signed online

All three include every word written for you and a month of free fixes after launch, and all three take one to two weeks from our first call. You buy the website name in your own name, about $11 a year. You can pay half up front and half at launch, or split it over four months at no extra cost. The details are on the pricing page

Five years, side by side

Here is every option added up over five years, long enough for a monthly fee and a one-time price to be compared fairly

Website names are counted at $10.46 a year, the at-cost price at Cloudflare, after any free first year. Squarespace renews its own at $20, so that row uses $20. I could not confirm what Wix renews at, so that row is counted at cost too

The builder rows assume you never pay anybody to help. My rows assume you never ask for a change after the free month, and most people eventually do. After that month an hour of changes is $70, and most changes are a photo, a price or a date, so one hour covers several of them. The booking app rows include booking and payment software, which is worth something if you would pay for it anyway

What actually moves the price

Whoever builds it, the same five things decide what a makeup artist website costs

1. How many pages. One page that scrolls is the cheapest thing to build. Separate pages for bridal, trials and the wider party cost more, and they give a search for bridal makeup in your town something specific to land on
2. The gallery. One set of photos is simple. Several galleries, sorted into natural looks, glam and the whole party, take longer to set up and to keep quick on a phone
3. The inquiry form. A form that asks for the wedding date, the venue and how many people saves you a round of messages. It also needs testing, because a form that quietly fails costs you a bride. I test software for a living, so I send every form myself before launch
4. Contracts and deposits. Anything a client signs or pays through the site needs a back office behind it. On my prices that is the step from $1,000 to $1,800, and if you already take deposits through a booking app you like, linking to it is the cheaper route
5. The writing. On a builder you write every page yourself. At all three of my prices the words are written for you, from what you already have

Which one I would pick in your place

If you enjoy building things and want to change the site every week, a builder is a good choice. If you already live in a booking app, the site that comes with it is a fine place to start. If you want the site written and built for you, owned outright, with nothing to pay each month, that is the job I do

You can open one I built for a bridal makeup artist at Makeup X Chloe, or see what goes on a makeup artist website I build

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