How Much Does a Custom Showit Website Cost? What Actually Affects the Price
By Chloe Leonard, Founder of CL Studio
If you've started pricing out a Showit website, you've probably noticed the range is all over the place: $2,000 here, $15,000 there, with a lot of "it depends" in between. Here's the honest answer: a Showit website typically runs anywhere from $2,500 for a customized template to $15,000+ for a fully custom design-and-build, and where you land depends almost entirely on scope. Let's break down exactly what drives that number.
Showit is a favorite among designers precisely because it's flexible: you can build almost anything on it, from a simple template tweak to a completely bespoke site. That flexibility is also why the pricing conversation is confusing. A "Showit website" isn't one product with one price tag. It's a spectrum, and knowing where you fall on it before you talk to a designer will save everyone time.
The Short Answer: Two Main Pricing Tiers
Before we get into the details, here's the range in plain terms.
Customized Showit template: roughly $2,500–$6,000. You start with an existing Showit template, and a designer (or you, with some hand-holding) customizes fonts, colors, imagery, and layout to fit your brand. We love building off of the Tonic Site Shop templates!
Fully custom design-and-build: roughly $6,000–$15,000+. Every page is designed from scratch around your brand and your specific business goals: no template underneath. You can see some examples of past ShowIt sites below!
These are general industry ranges, not a CL Studio price list. As a boutique web design agency in Nashville, we don't have one fixed number because no two projects are the same. If you're bundling a full brand identity with your website, that combined project (strategy, logo, visual identity, and site) more commonly runs $5,000–$20,000+, over about 6–12 weeks kickoff to launch. Website-only pricing, without branding work included, tends to land lower, but exact numbers always depend on scope, which is exactly what we're about to walk through.
Worth noting: "customized template" doesn't mean a cheap or generic result. It means the underlying page structure comes from a pre-built Showit design, and the work goes into making it unmistakably yours: your fonts, your colors, your photography, your copy, your layout tweaks. Plenty of gorgeous, high-converting websites started life as a template. The label just tells you where the design hours went.
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A behind the scenes look at the wireframes we build in Figma for a custom ShowIt website for a San Diego-based therapy practice. You can learn more about the project here.
What Actually Affects the Price
Two websites can both be "Showit sites" and cost wildly different amounts. Here's what moves the number, in roughly the order it tends to matter.
1. Number of Unique Page Designs
This is usually the single biggest cost driver. A five-page site (home, about, services, portfolio, contact) with each page uniquely designed costs more than a template with a couple of tweaked pages. Every additional unique layout (a dedicated services page, a blog template, a resources hub) adds design time.
If you're trying to keep costs down, prioritize the pages people actually visit before they book or buy, and consider template-based inner pages for the rest.
2. Custom Photography or Illustration
Stock imagery keeps costs predictable. A brand photoshoot, custom icon set, or original illustration work adds both cost and timeline, and it's often sourced or coordinated separately from the web design fee itself. If you already have a photographer you love, loop them in early so your designer can build around real images instead of placeholders.
Custom ShowIt Web design for a Colorado-based wedding photographer. Learn more about the project here.
3. Copywriting: Included or Not
Some web design packages include copywriting; many don't. If your designer is writing your homepage headline, services descriptions, and calls to action from scratch, that's a meaningfully different scope than you handing over finished copy. Ask upfront whether copy is included, priced separately, or entirely on you. This single line item causes more budget surprises than almost anything else. If you’re interested specifically in how to write an About page that actually converts, click here.
4. Booking, Ecommerce, and Integrations
A simple contact form is baked into most packages. Once you add booking software (Acuity, Calendly with custom styling), ecommerce functionality, membership areas, or third-party integrations (Klaviyo or Flodesk signup flows, CRM connections, scheduling tools specific to med spas or wellness studios), expect the price and timeline to climb. These features usually need custom design and testing beyond a standard page build.
5. Migrating From Another Platform
If you're moving from Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress, someone has to move your content (copy, images, blog posts, SEO redirects) into the new site without losing what's already working for you (especially search rankings). Migration work is often quoted separately from new design work because it's a different kind of labor: careful, detail-heavy, and easy to underestimate.
The size of the migration matters too. Moving over a five-page brochure site is a very different job than migrating years of blog posts, a resource library, or an existing online store. If you have a lot of existing content, ask any designer you're considering how they handle migration and redirects specifically. It's a common place for scope (and cost) to get missed until it's too late to plan for. Learn more about the difference between Showit, Squarespace and Shopify here.
6. Timeline
Rush timelines cost more. A designer fitting your project into an already-full calendar, or compressing a normal 3–5 week build into 2 weeks, is taking on real scheduling risk, and that's often reflected in price. If budget matters more to you than speed, say so upfront and ask about standard timelines instead of expedited ones.
Template vs. Fully Custom: Which Is Right for You?
Neither option is "better": they solve different problems.
A customized template makes sense if:
You have a clear brand already (or a simple one) and mostly need it applied well
Your site structure is fairly standard for your industry
Budget and timeline matter more than a completely one-of-a-kind layout
A fully custom build makes sense if:
Your brand identity is central to how clients perceive you (common for med spas, skincare brands, and wellness studios competing on aesthetic and trust)
You need a site structure a template genuinely can't support: a complex services page, a robust portfolio, integrated booking
You're building this site to last several years and want room to grow into it
If you're still deciding, our post on [internal link: How to Design a Services Page That Books More Clients] is a good next read: it'll help you think through what your site actually needs to do before you price out how it should look.
With our custom websites on Showit, we make sure the entire site is optimized for desktop, tablet, and mobile, which helps create a better user experience.
A Quick Budgeting Checklist
Before you request quotes, get clear on:
How many unique pages you actually need
Whether you have brand assets (logo, colors, fonts) or need those built too
Whether you have usable photography or need a shoot
Whether you're writing your own copy or need a copywriter
Any booking, ecommerce, or software integrations you require
Whether you're migrating from an existing site
Your realistic timeline, and whether it's flexible
Answering these before your first designer call gets you a far more accurate quote, faster, and it helps you tell the difference between a low quote that's a genuinely good deal and one that's missing scope you'll need to pay for later anyway.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a Showit template site "less professional" than a custom one?
Not at all. A well-chosen, well-customized template can look completely bespoke to your visitors. They'll never know it started as a template. The difference isn't professionalism, it's flexibility: a custom build gives you more room for unusual layouts or specific functionality, while a customized template gets you a polished, on-brand site faster and for less.
Does the price include ongoing updates after launch?'
Usually not, unless it's explicitly part of your package. Most web design projects cover the initial design and build; ongoing content updates, seasonal refreshes, or new page additions are typically quoted separately, either as one-off requests or a monthly maintenance arrangement. Ask any designer you're considering what happens after launch day.
Why do some designers charge so much less than others for a "Showit website"?
Scope. A lower quote often means fewer unique pages, template-based inner pages, no copywriting, and stock photography, which can be exactly right for some businesses. A higher quote usually reflects more custom design work, more integrations, or more strategy built into the process. Always compare what's actually included, not just the bottom-line number.
Can I start with a template and upgrade to custom later?
Yes, and it's a completely reasonable way to launch. Many businesses start with a customized template to get online and start marketing, then invest in a fully custom rebuild once they have more clarity on their brand and more budget to work with. A good designer can help you build the template version in a way that won't fight you later.
How long does a Showit website project actually take?
A customized template can often launch in a few weeks. A fully custom build more typically takes 3–5 weeks from kickoff, especially when it includes brand strategy, custom photography, or copywriting. Rushed timelines are possible but usually cost more, for the scheduling reasons above.
Ready to Get an Actual Number for Your Project?
Every range in this post is a starting point, not a quote: the only way to know what your specific project costs is to talk through your actual scope: your pages, your goals, your existing assets, and your timeline. If you're ready for that conversation, reach out to CL Studio and we'll walk through it together and give you real numbers for your real project, no pressure attached.
I'm Chloe, founder of CL Studio, a boutique brand, web design, and email marketing studio based in Nashville, TN, working with service-based and wellness businesses across the country.
Over the past decade I've helped therapists, med spas, skincare brands, and wellness studios build brands and websites that actually reflect the quality of what they do, and I've contributed creative work for names like Almost 30 Podcast, Clearstem Skincare, HarperCollins, and Free People along the way. If you're weighing your options for a new Showit site, I'd love to hear about your project.