How Much Does It Actually Cost to Start an Online Business?

By Peter Anderson, OnlineStriver.com

When I first started looking into building a website, I couldn’t get a straight answer to this question anywhere. Every article either said “you can start for free!” (technically true, but not the full story) or buried the real numbers under a sales pitch for something expensive.

So here’s the honest version, looking at the cost to start an online business, based on what I’ve actually spent building my two real websites: lothianwalkies.com, my dog walking business, and this site, OnlineStriver.com.

Quick answer

You can start for £0 and have a genuine online income attempt within a week. Most people end up spending somewhere between £0 and £15 a month once they want their own domain name and reliable hosting. That’s it. Anyone telling you that you need thousands of pounds upfront to “get started properly” is usually selling something you don’t need yet.

The absolute minimum: £0

When I built lothianwalkies.com, I didn’t spend a penny to get the site live and my training. Wealthy Affiliate’s free tier includes:

• Step-by-step training for complete beginners
• A basic website with hosting included
• Access to the keyword research tool
• Access to the community for questions

This is genuinely enough to build a real, working site and learn the fundamentals. I used exactly this to build a council-approved business website with no prior experience.

What you’ll likely want to pay for eventually

Once you’re serious about it, here’s where small, sensible costs come in:

A proper domain name: around £10-15 a year (e.g. yourbusiness.com instead of a longer default address). This is the first upgrade most people make, because a proper domain looks more professional and is easier for people to remember and trust.

Premium hosting/training — Wealthy Affiliate’s Premium tier runs about £40-50 a month if you commit to it, though there are often lower rates for annual billing. This unlocks unlimited websites (up to a point), faster hosting, deeper training modules, and more active community support. I’ve been a Premium member for years and consider it worth it for the training alone, not just the hosting.

Email marketing tool — I use Brevo, which has a genuinely useful free tier (up to a certain number of emails per month) that’s enough for most beginners’ first year or two. You only need to pay once your list grows past the free limit.

Design tools — Canva’s free tier covers almost everything a beginner needs for social graphics, Pinterest pins, and basic branding. I still use the free version for most of what I do.

What you don’t need to spend money on (yet)

• A custom-coded website or a web developer — you can build a fully professional site yourself with the right training, as I did twice
• Paid advertising — not necessary while you’re building organic content and learning what works
• Expensive “guru” courses promising a shortcut — the free and low-cost tools above cover everything you actually need in the beginning

My honest recommendation for starting an online business

Start completely free. Use the free training to build your first site and get comfortable with the basics. Only spend money once you hit an actual limit that free tools can’t solve for you — that’s the point where paying makes sense, not before.

If you want the exact breakdown of the tools I used to go from a dog walker with no technical experience to a live, council-approved business website, I put together a free guide covering exactly that — you can grab it further down this page.

I’ve also written a full, honest review of Wealthy Affiliate, the platform I used for both of my sites, if you want to see whether it’s the right starting point for you: Wealthy Affiliate Review 2026