Free websites used to be a joke: a banner ad, a page that looked like 1998, and an address nobody could remember. That's no longer true. A good free page today loads fast, looks clean, and gets found on a phone.

What free gets you

• One page, usually from a template or a form.
• An address you don't own — fastpages.online/your-business, or yourname.wixsite.com/business.
• Hosting and SSL, handled.
• No maintenance — nothing to update, nothing to break.
• Limits — no extra pages, no custom design, sometimes the provider's ads.

What paid adds

• Your own domain — the main real benefit.
• More pages — services, gallery, about, contact.
• Photos and design control.
• Forms, bookings, shops — depending on the platform.
• Support, sometimes.

What you're actually paying for

Two real things, and a lot of packaging:

1. An address you control. davesplowing.com is short, printable, memorable, and yours to take to another provider. That's worth $10–$20 a year — the domain — plus whatever the platform charges to connect it.

2. Room to say more. If you genuinely have different things to tell different people, extra pages earn their keep. If you have one trade and one phone number, they don't.

Everything else — "professional," "custom," "SEO-ready," "premium templates" — is packaging. A one-page free site with good text is more professional than a paid site with vague text.

When free is genuinely enough

• One trade, one service area, one phone number.
• You're starting and don't yet know if the business needs a website at all.
• You don't want to maintain anything.
• You're not printing the address on a truck yet.

Many one-person trades run for years this way. The page does its job: it exists, it's accurate, it loads.

When to pay

• You're printing the address on cards or a vehicle. Own the domain before you print.
• You need more than one page for a real reason.
• You want email at your business name — which requires a domain, not a paid website.
• A customer has asked for something the free page can't do.

Notice the trigger is always a specific thing you couldn't do, not a feeling that the free page looks cheap.

The hidden costs of free

Being fair to the paid side: free has costs too.

• The address is harder to say. "fastpages.online/daves-plowing" needs explaining. That's a real, repeated cost.
• You don't control it. The provider can change the terms, add ads, or shut down. Keep a copy of your own text.
• Less room. If the business grows past one page, you'll move — which means redoing it.

None of those is fatal. All of them are why people eventually pay.

The sensible path

Start free. Put the page up, put the link in your Google listing, print it on your next batch of cards. Run it for six months and see whether the phone rings.

If it does and you're still in business, buy a domain and — only if you actually need them — more pages. That's roughly $15 a year plus whatever platform you choose.

Starting paid, at $25 a month, before you know whether anyone visits, is the wrong order. See what a website costs for the full picture.