First, the name you can actually keep
Decide the name before you spend anything, because the name has to survive three separate checks. It has to be registrable at the Trade Register, it must not collide with somebody else's trademark, and the domain has to be free.
Do all three on the same afternoon. A name that clears the register but has no available address on the web will cost you more in workarounds than a better name would have cost in imagination.
Say the name out loud on the phone. If you have to spell it every time, it is the wrong name for a small business that will live on word of mouth.
What you need before the site
Four things, and none of them are design. You need to know what you sell and to whom, what you charge or at least how you price, how a customer reaches you, and what proof you can show that you can do the work.
Without those, a website is an expensive way to publish uncertainty. With them, even one page is enough to start trading.
The proof is the part people skip. Photographs of work you have done, a previous employer's reference, a qualification, a certificate, the name of the first customer who agreed to be named. Gather it before you brief anybody.
Starting a business in Finland, in the order that saves money
Do it in this sequence. Name and domain, then the start-up notification, then a single page with your offer and your contact details, then the Google Business Profile, then the bank account and invoicing, then the real website once you know what customers actually ask you.
The expensive mistake is building a full site in month one. You do not yet know which of your services sells, which words customers use, or which questions they ask before buying. Three months of trading answers all of that for free.
The second expensive mistake is trading for a year with no site at all, because then every enquiry has to be earned twice.
Business ID, VAT and what goes on the page
You file one start-up notification and it reaches two authorities at once, the Trade Register kept by the Finnish Patent and Registration Office and the registers of the Tax Administration. The service is at ytj.fi, and notifications to the Tax Administration are free of charge. The Trade Register charges a handling fee.
In the same notification you say whether you are applying to the VAT register, the prepayment register and the employer register. There is a turnover limit below which a very small business can stay outside the VAT register, and the figure has moved in recent years, so read the current one on vero.fi rather than in anybody's blog.
Once you have the Business ID, it belongs on the website. A company selling online has to identify itself properly, which in practice means the name, the Business ID, an address and a working email in the footer or on the contact page. We cover exactly what to put where in the Finnish business ID and what has to be on your website.
What the registration itself costs
The Trade Register handling fees are published by the Patent and Registration Office. Checked on the PRH price list on 20 September 2026, and valid from 1 January 2026, a start-up notification costs 75 euros for a private trader, 300 euros for a limited liability company filed through the guided online process and 400 euros for any other limited liability company filing, 300 euros for a general partnership or a limited partnership, and 400 euros for a branch of a foreign company. There is no VAT on these fees.
Those numbers change, so confirm them on prh.fi on the day you file rather than trusting a figure you read somewhere.
Budget for the fee, the domain and the first year of hosting together. That total is small enough that it should never be the thing delaying the start.
Domain, email and hosting
Register the domain yourself, in your own name or the company's, before anything else. It is the cheapest part of the whole project and the only part that is genuinely irreplaceable.
A .fi address signals a Finnish company to Finnish customers and is worth having even if you also buy a .com. The rules about who may hold one and what the name may contain are in our guide to the .fi domain.
Hosting can be modest at the start and is easy to change later. The domain is the thing to get right on day one, because moving away from a supplier who holds it for you is the one job that can actually block you.
The email address that is not a free mailbox
Set up an address at your own domain the same day you register it. A quote from a free mailbox address tells a prospective customer that the business might not be here next year, whether that is fair or not.
One address is enough at the start. Point it at whatever mailbox you already read, because an address you check twice a week is worse than no address at all.
Configure the email authentication records while somebody technical is already in the DNS settings. It takes ten minutes then, and it is what stops your invoices landing in spam later.
One page is enough in the first month
A single page with what you do, who it is for, your prices or your pricing logic, three pieces of proof, your area, your phone number and your Business ID will win work. Many one-person businesses in Finland run on exactly that for a year.
Write it in your own words first, even badly. Whoever builds the site can fix the grammar. Nobody else can supply the specifics that make a reader believe you.
Make sure it works on a phone, loads fast and has the phone number as a tappable link. Those three things matter more than the typeface.
Prices on the site, or not
Publish something. A full price list if you sell defined jobs, an hourly rate if that is how you work, or a realistic starting point with the reasons a job goes above it.
The argument for hiding prices is that every job is different. The result of hiding them is a stream of enquiries from people who were never going to afford you, and silence from the ones who assumed the worst.
If you genuinely cannot publish a number, publish the ranges of a few typical past jobs and describe what moved the price. That is honest and it filters just as well.
Your Google Business Profile before your website
If customers come to you, or you travel to them locally, create the profile on day one. It is free, it appears in the map results, and for many small Finnish businesses it produces more calls in the first six months than the website does.
Fill in the service area, the hours, the phone number and a handful of real photographs. Ask your first three customers for a review, in whatever language they prefer.
It also gives you somewhere legitimate to be found while the site is still a single page.
The contact form, cookies and the privacy page
The moment you collect a name and an email address, you are processing personal data and you need a privacy page that says what you collect, why, how long you keep it and how somebody asks you to delete it.
Keep the site free of tracking scripts you do not need and the cookie question gets much simpler. Most small business sites do not need anything beyond basic analytics that can be configured without personal identifiers.
The practical detail, including when you actually need a consent banner, is in GDPR and cookies on a Finnish website.
Invoices, and what customers will ask you for
Business customers in Finland will ask for an electronic invoice and for your details in a specific format. Sort out how you invoice before the first job, not after it, because a late first invoice sets the tone for the whole relationship.
Your website should carry the invoicing details somewhere findable, so a new client's accounts department can get what it needs without emailing you.
Keep the same company details everywhere, register, bank, invoices, website footer. Mismatched addresses across those four cause more small administrative pain than anything else in the first year.
What can wait
Almost everything. A logo designed by an agency, a blog, an online shop, a newsletter, social media accounts on four platforms, a booking system, photography of a team you do not yet have. None of it earns anything in month one.
The about page can wait too, at least in its final form. Write two honest sentences and move on.
What cannot wait is the domain, a way to be contacted, a way to be paid and one page that explains the offer. Everything else is an improvement to something that already exists.
What it will cost to build
The honest answer is that it depends on how many pages, how much of the content you write yourself, whether you need a shop or a booking system, and whether somebody has to make photographs. Anybody who quotes a fixed number before asking those questions is guessing.
What you can do is control the variables. Supplying your own text and photographs, starting with fewer pages and skipping features you cannot yet justify all move the figure down a long way.
We broke the whole thing down in how much a website costs in Finland, including the parts that are easy to forget.
A checklist for one week
Monday, settle the name and check it against the register, the trademark databases and the free domains. Tuesday, register the domain and set up the email address. Wednesday, file the start-up notification and pay the fee.
Thursday, write the single page in your own words and collect the proof. Friday, create the Google Business Profile and get the page online, even roughly.
That is a functioning business presence in five days, for the price of a registration fee and a domain. The good website comes in month four, when you know what your customers actually ask.