How much to charge for an AI website

Forty minutes of build time is margin you keep. The price a client agrees to has never tracked your hours, and the only thing that changed when a model started writing the markup is that the hours stopped being a defensible basis for the number.

The verdict: band the work by what is in the file, quote the band, and say you used AI without apologizing for it. Three bands cover the range, and the distance between the bottom and the top is not tool skill. It is whether anything in the output was decided before the first prompt.

you shipped an app fast with Lovable / v0 / Cursor and it works, but it looks and behaves like the AI default.

a freelancer advertising this exact fix on Hacker News, July 2026

That sentence, from a post in the "Who wants to be hired?" thread, sells the whole top band, because it names the thing your client is quietly worried about and nobody else on the shortlist will say out loud.

What the client pays for when the build takes an hour#

The model will produce whatever it is told to produce, at any ratio, any curve, any palette. What it produces when nobody specifies is a house style, and that house style is easy to spot on new small business sites. Your client has seen it. They may not have a name for it, and they recognize it.

So the sellable thing is the specification, not the generation. A brief with values in it is the only part of this work a competitor cannot reproduce by typing your prompt into the same tool. Everything downstream of it is a keystroke, which is exactly why the keystroke is worth nothing and the brief is worth four figures.

Three questions decide which band a project belongs in:

1. Did a person choose the type scale, or did the framework?
2. Does the motion have a curve and a duration somebody picked, or does everything move on cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1) at 150ms?
3. Does the client receive a document at the end, or a login?

Two yeses put you in the middle band. Three put you in the top one. Zero is a $900 site, and there is nothing wrong with selling those as long as you know that is what you are selling. The test is deliberately about the artifact rather than about you: a designer with fifteen years of taste who ships an unedited generation is selling $900 of work, and somebody six months in who writes the scale down first is selling $4,000 of it. That asymmetry is the whole opening in this market, and it closes as soon as everybody notices it.

Three yeses look like this on app and product pages, where the direction existed before the build:

Three bands for a generated site#

The prices below assume a five to nine template site for a business with real revenue. They are this model's bands rather than survey figures; for scale, Clutch reports that most web design projects reviewed on its platform cost less than $10,000, at the time of writing (Clutch). Adjust for market, not for build time.

Row two is the single highest-return move available to a freelancer right now. One afternoon of decisions, no new skill in the tool, and roughly four times the invoice. The reason it works is that the client is comparing you to other generated sites, not to a design studio, and a chosen type scale is instantly visible against a default one.

Row three needs an artifact you may not own yet, which is a full set of art direction written as values. Thanor is a library of exactly that: each design comes with a long prompt that states the palette, type, spacing and motion, and the license covers client work. The prompt itself stays with you, so the specification you hand over is your own one-page record of the values you used. How to start a web design business with AI shows that page as a house file you reuse on every project.

One caution about the top row of that table, which is the bottom of the market. It is a legitimate product and a poor business: a $900 client sends the same volume of email as a $9,000 client and expects the same availability on a Sunday. Sell that band only as a deliberate way into a niche you intend to keep working in, and price the second project at the middle band from the first call. For a local trade, how to sell websites to local businesses builds a directed page before the first call, so the conversation starts above the generated band.

The line items that hold the top band#

Put these on the proposal as named deliverables with counts, because a client who can count what they are buying stops negotiating the total.

• A design specification, one page, tokens written as CSS custom properties: the scale, the ramp, the palette with a role per value. When the client points at a reference site, the values come from measuring it, the legal way, never from its code.
• Type per breakpoint, the ratio itself shifting from 1.2 at 375px to 1.333 at 1440px, each step expressed with clamp().
• An image treatment: crop ratios of 4 / 5 for people and 3 / 2 for interiors, a grade at saturate(0.92) contrast(1.04), grain at 4%.
• A motion sheet: cubic-bezier(0.16, 1, 0.3, 1) at 560ms for entrances, cubic-bezier(0.33, 1, 0.68, 1) at 160ms for hovers, and the prefers-reduced-motion branch written out.
• One signature moment, described as a mechanism, built once, used once.
• A walkthrough recording, ninety seconds, no music, showing where every editable field lives.

Six artifacts, and five of them are documents. That ratio is the point: the site is the smallest part of what changes hands, which is what makes the fee survive the client discovering that a model wrote the components.

Price them individually in the proposal even though you sell them as one number. A client who can see that the specification, the motion sheet and the walkthrough are three separate things stops reading the total as the price of a website and starts reading it as the price of six deliverables, which is a different conversation with a different ending.

What you hand over on Friday#

A $12,000 handover is a folder, not a URL. Inside it: the specification, the motion sheet, the palette with contrast ratios stated, the font license receipts, the recording, and a one-page note on what the design refuses to do so that the client's next hire does not undo it in two weeks.

That last document is the one nobody writes and the one that gets you rehired. Direction includes deciding what not to move, and writing that down is the difference between a site that holds its look for two years and one that accumulates a new accent color every quarter.

What the note contains, in five lines:

• The two curves, and the instruction that a third is not to be added.
• The seven type sizes, and that nothing between them is permitted.
• The accent, and the rule that one screen gets one use of it.
• The crop ratios, and which subjects take which.
• The single section built for this client, and a note that it is not a pattern to be repeated elsewhere on the site.

Price the folder, deliver the folder, and the awkward question about AI never arrives. If it does arrive, the honest answer is short, and the longer version of that answer is here. Clients who have paid for six documents rarely go hunting for a reason to feel cheated.

The verdict on pricing an AI build#

Quote $3,000 minimum for anything you designed as well as built, and $10,000 when a specification exists on paper before the first prompt. The band is set by the file, the file is set by the brief, and the brief is the only part of this that takes a human being. The same afternoon of building supports either number, and nothing in that sentence depends on getting better at prompting.

Three moves, in order of return:

1. Settle a type scale, a five-role palette and two curves once, then reuse them across every project.
2. Put those values in the proposal as commitments rather than showing them off in a portfolio afterwards.
3. Add the specification, the motion sheet and the walkthrough recording to the deliverables list, and quote for the folder instead of for the site.

None of the three requires a new tool, a new subscription or a course. They require a page of decisions that exists before the first prompt, which is the only scarce thing left in this business now that the building is cheap.

For the broader version of this, covering builds where AI never comes up, the four band model is here. For the value-by-value version, read what changes between a $500 and a $15,000 site.

Open Brisk and read its direction end to end, then write your next specification to the same level of detail before the first prompt. A free account opens the designs marked free, such as Vesperion, and the plans open the rest of the library.