A personal website costs $0 if you are willing to live on a platform subdomain, and roughly $100 to $120 a year if you want it on a domain you own with no platform branding. On Folio the site, the hosting and the SSL certificate are included at $0 on the Free plan, which publishes you at portfolio.wrxstack.com/yourname and shows a "Made with Folio" mark. Pro is $9 a month, or $90 billed annually (Rs 599 a month in India), and that is what lets you connect a domain, which you buy separately from a registrar for roughly $10 to $20 a year.
The number
The real answer, before the sales pitch
Search this question and you get a shrug dressed up as an answer: anywhere from nothing to six figures. That range is technically true and practically useless, and it exists because the pages publishing it are written by companies that sell websites, or by affiliate sites paid when you click through to one. Nobody in that supply chain is paid to tell you the number is small.
For a personal website, meaning a page about you with your work, your resume and a way to contact you, the number is small. Two line items exist. Hosting, which for a page like this should be nothing, because serving a personal site costs a modern platform almost nothing. And the domain, which is the one thing you genuinely have to buy, because a name on the internet is rented from a registrar and nobody gives that away permanently.
That gives you two honest prices. Zero, if you publish on a platform subdomain and accept the platform badge that comes with it. Or somewhere around a hundred dollars a year if you want the site to live at your own name with no badge on it. There is no third number for a personal site. If a quote arrives with more digits, you are being sold something else.
On Folio
The line items, as they actually bill
These are our own numbers, not estimates. Hosting, SSL and the URL are included at every tier, including the one that costs nothing.
The routes
What each way of getting online really bills you
Three ways to put a personal site on the internet. The differences show up in year two, not year one.
| Capability | Folio | Mainstream website builder | Code it and host it yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publishing at $0 | Yes. Free plan, a live URL, hosting and SSL included | Usually yes, on their subdomain, with their badge on your page | Yes on a free static host, if you can build and deploy the site |
| Hosting cost | Included at every tier, including Free | Included, and bundled into the plan you pay for | Free for static pages, real money the moment you need a server |
| Your own domain | Pro at $9 a month. You buy the domain from a registrar yourself | Requires a paid plan, often with a domain thrown in for year one | You buy it and you renew it, with nothing bundled |
| Removing the platform mark | Included in Pro | A paid plan, and sometimes a higher one than you expect | Nothing to remove |
| Designs and templates | Core designs on Free, the full 60-theme gallery on Pro | Free themes exist, the good ones are often a one-time purchase | Free templates, or as many evenings as you want to spend |
| Resume PDF and DOCX export | Free on every plan, unwatermarked, every layout | Not something a website builder does at all | Whatever you build yourself, or a separate tool that charges you |
| Upkeep after launch | None. Updates, certificates and backups are ours to worry about | Low, until an app you depend on changes its pricing | Yours forever. Dependencies, certificates, deploys, and outages at 2am |
Builder pricing moves constantly, so we describe the shape of the trade rather than quote numbers that will be stale by the time you read this. Always look up the renewal price, not the launch price.
The fine print
Five costs that never appear on the pricing page
The sticker price is rarely the problem. These are the charges that arrive after you have already moved in.
Renewal
The renewal cliff
The headline price is very often an introductory rate for the first term, and the price you actually live with is the one that appears when it renews. Before you commit, find the renewal price. It is always published, and it is never the number in the big font.
Domain
The domain that is free for exactly one year
A bundled domain is a discount with an expiry date. It costs nothing for the first year, then renews at the standard rate, and you generally have to keep paying for the plan to keep the domain pointed anywhere useful. Buying the domain yourself keeps the two bills separate, which is exactly what you want if you ever move.
Apps
Plugins you rent forever
On plugin-driven platforms the base plan is cheap and the pieces that make it usable are not. A form here, a gallery there, an analytics add-on, each a small monthly fee, all of them recurring. Add four of those and your cheap website is no longer cheap.
Themes
The template you buy twice
Premium templates are usually sold as a one-time purchase, which sounds fine until you want a different look in eighteen months. Then it is another one-time purchase. Check whether switching designs later costs anything before you buy the first one.
Export
The paywall at the download button
This is the classic in resume tools: writing is free, and downloading the file is not. On Folio the resume PDF and DOCX export is ungated on every plan, with no watermark and every layout available. Free really does mean free at that button, and it also means 0 custom domains, a "Made with Folio" mark on your site, core designs only, and 10 AI drafting generations a month.
The $0 route
Getting a personal website online without paying anything
This is the whole path. It ends with a live, secure, indexable site and a bill of zero.
Claim your URL.
Sign up and pick your handle. Your site goes live at portfolio.wrxstack.com/yourname. It is a real, public, shareable address with a certificate on it, and it costs nothing to keep.
Put the content in once.
Your bio, your projects, your experience and your links go in a single time. The same content then feeds your portfolio page, your resume and your cover letters, so you are not maintaining three copies of your own life.
Publish, and download your resume.
Hosting, SSL, analytics and the contact form come with the Free plan. So does the resume export: pick a layout, check the ATS score, and download the PDF or DOCX with no watermark and no upgrade prompt.
Know exactly what zero leaves out.
Free gives you 0 custom domains, so the URL stays on our subdomain. It shows a "Made with Folio" mark. You get the core designs rather than the full 60-theme gallery, 512 MB of media, 10 AI drafting generations a month, and 5,000 API calls. If none of that bothers you, stay on Free indefinitely. We are not going to hold your download hostage to change your mind.
The upgrade
When paying is worth it, and when it is not
There is exactly one reason to move off a free personal site, and it is the address. A subdomain is a page you are renting on someone else's property, and everything you build on it, the links, the search authority, the muscle memory of people who type your URL, belongs partly to them. A domain you own is portable. You can change platforms in three years and keep the address, and every link anyone ever shared still works.
That is what Pro buys on Folio: the domain connection (up to 3 of them), no platform mark, the full 60-theme gallery, 5 GB of media and 200 AI generations a month, at $9 a month or $90 for the year. Add a .com at roughly $12 and your all-in cost of being findable under your own name is about a hundred dollars a year. That is the entire bill. There is nothing else to buy, and no download that costs extra.
When is it not worth it? When you are three weeks from a job hunt and you do not have a site at all. A live page on a subdomain today beats a perfect domain you have not bought yet. Ship on Free, send the link, and upgrade when the address starts to matter to you rather than because a banner told you it should.
The outliers
Why some quotes come back in the thousands
If you ask an agency what a website costs, the number will be large, and the agency is not lying to you. They are pricing a different object. A business website comes with discovery calls, a custom design system, a CMS an entire team has to be trained on, integrations, accessibility review, and a maintenance retainer. Every one of those is real work, and none of it is work your personal site needs.
The same trap catches people who go the developer route for personal reasons. Building a site from scratch is free in dollars and expensive in the only currency you cannot buy back. You will spend the first weekend on the layout, the second on the deploy, and then somewhere in year two you will discover that the certificate expired, or a dependency broke the build, and the site your name points at has been down for a month. That is a fine hobby. It is a bad plan for something a recruiter might open tomorrow.
So the practical rule: if you are pricing a website for a company, get quotes. If you are pricing a website for yourself, the ceiling is about the cost of one takeaway meal a month, and the floor is nothing at all.
Frequently asked questions
Are personal websites free?
Yes, if you accept a platform subdomain. Folio publishes your site free at portfolio.wrxstack.com/yourname with hosting, an SSL certificate, analytics and a contact form included, and the resume PDF export carries no watermark or paywall. What free does not include is the address: the Free plan allows 0 custom domains, shows a "Made with Folio" mark, limits you to the core designs and gives you 10 AI drafting generations a month.
How much does a personal website cost to host?
For a personal site, hosting should be $0. A page with your bio, your projects and your resume is small and static enough that serving it costs a platform almost nothing, which is why every serious builder folds hosting into the plan instead of billing it separately. Treat a separate hosting invoice as a sign you are buying infrastructure sized for a business, not for you.
Is owning a website free? What about the domain?
The domain is the one part nobody can give you for free forever. You rent a name from a registrar, typically for something in the range of $10 to $20 a year for a .com, and it stays yours only while you keep renewing. Anything advertised as a free domain is almost always free for the first year and billed at the normal rate after that, so look up the renewal price before you accept the offer.
How much does it cost to make a portfolio website?
The same as any other personal site, because a portfolio is a personal site with the projects moved to the front. On Folio you can publish one, with a live URL and no time limit, for nothing. Connecting your own domain and dropping the platform mark takes Pro at $9 a month, and the domain itself is a separate registrar fee of roughly $10 to $20 a year.
How much is a Wix or Squarespace portfolio website?
Both are subscriptions, and the exact figure changes often enough that any number printed here would be wrong within a quarter. What matters is the shape: their entry tiers put a badge on your page, their own domain and badge removal sit on a paid plan, and any first-year domain offer renews at the standard price. Read the renewal column of their pricing table, not the promotional one, and compare that against what a personal site actually needs.
What is the cheapest way to get a personal website?
Start on a free plan that gives you a real, indexable URL rather than a trial that expires, get the content live, and buy a domain only when your name being the address starts to matter. That order costs you nothing to begin and never leaves you with a half-built site. The trap in the cheap-builder category is a low entry price with the export, the domain or the branding held back for later.