Agency, Your Nephew, or Do It Yourself with AI? The Three Real Options in Mexico
In Mexico there are three ways to build your business website: the agency (upfront fee plus a monthly charge), the friend who knows computers (free, but he moves on), or doing it yourself with artificial intelligence (cheaper and faster to change).
You asked for three quotes for your business website, and you got back three answers that don’t look anything alike. One agency wants a deposit plus a monthly fee. Another sends you a package with stuff you didn’t understand. And your nephew, the one who knows computers, said he’d build it for free over the weekend.
All three numbers are correct. The problem is you’re not comparing the same thing.
Almost everything you find online compares Wix against Squarespace against WordPress. That’s written for a different country. In Mexico, when a small business decides to get a website, it’s almost always choosing between these three: the agency, the friend, or sitting down and building it yourself with artificial intelligence. Let’s go through them one by one, the good and the bad of each.
How much does an agency charge to build a website?
A small agency or a formal freelancer charges you two things: an upfront fee (usually several thousand pesos) and, almost always, a monthly “maintenance and hosting” charge. That monthly fee is the part people don’t see coming: it keeps running next year, even if your website doesn’t change a single comma.
What you actually get, and it’s real: they take the work off your hands. Someone else writes the copy, arranges the photos, connects the domain, and answers the phone when something breaks. If you’re simply not going to sit down and do it yourself, this is worth what it costs. Paying to not do something isn’t foolish.
Where it hurts: the changes. You raised the price on three dishes and now you have to send an email, wait, check that they got it right, and sometimes pay for the change if you’ve already used up what came included. What takes two minutes in your head takes three days in practice. I’ve seen restaurant websites with last year’s prices, not because the owner doesn’t care, but because asking for the change feels like more hassle than the problem it solves.
Should I ask my nephew to build my website for free?
You can, and a lot of the time it’ll turn out well: it’s free or close to it, and young people tend to have a good eye and move fast.
The problem isn’t the quality. The problem is that he leaves. He graduates, lands a job in Monterrey, gets swamped with work, and stops answering. Not because he’s a bad person — it’s that your website was never his priority. A year later you need to change the hours and you don’t even know where it’s hosted.
And there’s one part that almost always goes wrong: the domain ends up in his name, with his email and his card. The day you need to get it back, you’ll be depending on him answering your WhatsApp. If you go this route, do just one thing: buy the domain yourself, with your own email and your own card, and have him connect it. It’s the difference between lending him the keys and giving away the house.
How do you build a website with artificial intelligence?
Today you can describe your business in your own words and have the website come out built, published, and with its own link — no picking a template, no dragging blocks around. This is the option that changed recently, which is why a lot of people still don’t consider it.
It’s writing something like “a website for my café with the menu, photos of the pastries, the address with a map, and a WhatsApp button for orders” and watching the site appear. If something doesn’t sit right, you say so: “make the WhatsApp button show up higher,” “remove the team section, there’s only two of us.”
What it costs: the domain (a few hundred pesos a year, and that one’s yours no matter what) plus the tool’s plan. It comes out considerably less than an agency’s deposit, and you’re not carrying a maintenance fee for a website you’re not even changing.
How long it takes: the first version, one afternoon. And here’s the part that really matters: change number thirty also takes two minutes. No email, no waiting, no “that’s an extra.”
What you still have to provide: the photos and the real details. The AI builds the structure, writes the copy, and makes it look good, but it doesn’t know how much your haircut costs or what time you close on Sundays. If you give it vague information, it’ll fill in the gaps with generic phrases, and it’ll show. Ten minutes gathering prices and hours before you start completely changes the result.
Agency, friend, or AI: which one should I choose?
It depends on how many times you’re going to want to change something in the first year — that’s the question that decides everything.
If the answer is “once or twice” and you have the budget, the agency is fine and saves you the trouble. If the answer is “every couple of weeks” — because you change the menu, prices, promotions, or classes — the agency is the worst deal of the three, not because it’s expensive, but because every change goes through someone else.
The agency is worth it when what you need isn’t a website, it’s a system: a large inventory with hundreds of products, online payment with unusual rules, connecting your point-of-sale, something custom-built. That’s where AI leaves you halfway there, and you’ll end up hiring someone anyway.
Doing it yourself with artificial intelligence is worth it when what you want is what most businesses want: to be found on Google, to have people see your prices and photos, know where you are and what time you open, and message you on WhatsApp. That’s 90% of cases, and today it doesn’t require hiring anyone.
Your nephew is worth it if he’s your nephew and you want to give him something to do. Just buy the domain yourself.
Before you decide
If you’ve never seen what the third path looks like, try it before signing anything. Describe your business on Proyecta — what you do, what you sell, your hours, whether you want a WhatsApp button — and see what comes out. It’ll take you less time than gathering the three quotes, and you’ll have something to compare against when the agency sends its proposal.
In the end, the best of the three is whichever one you’ll actually keep updated. A website with prices from two years ago hurts your business more than not having a website at all. Choose with change number thirty in mind, not the first one.
When you want to see it, go to proyecta.dev, describe it, and publish it.