How much does a website actually cost?

Why the same brief gets wildly different quotes

Because “a website” is not one thing. Two quotes can differ by ten times and both be honest, because they are describing different work. The five things that move the number most:

• How many pages, and how different they are. Five pages built from one template is barely more work than one page. Five pages that each need their own layout is five times the design work.
• Whether you need to edit it yourself. Adding a content management system means building an admin area, not just the page. It is the single biggest jump in most quotes — and worth it if you post updates, pointless if you never touch the site again.
• Whether the design is bespoke. A template adapted to your brand is fast. A design drawn from scratch for you, with custom motion and layouts, is a different job with a different price.
• What it has to connect to. Payments, bookings, a CRM, inventory, an email platform — each integration is real work, and each one can break in ways a static page cannot.
• How many rounds of changes are included. Two rounds of revisions is normal. Unlimited revisions is either priced in already or it is a trap for the person building it, which usually means it is priced in already.

What you are actually paying for

Clients often assume the cost is the visual design, because that is the part you can see. In practice the design is perhaps a third of it. The rest is the build: making the layout hold together on every screen size, wiring the contact form so the message actually reaches an inbox, compressing images so the page loads on a phone with two bars of signal, setting up hosting and the domain, and testing all of it before anyone else sees it.

This is also why the cheapest quotes are cheap. Skipping the invisible work is fast and nothing looks wrong on the day you hand it over. It shows up three months later, when the site is slow on mobile, the contact form has been quietly failing, and nobody can update the opening hours without calling the person who built it.

What is genuinely extra

A few costs are not the developer’s to charge, and you should be suspicious of a quote that hides them:

• Your domain name. A small yearly fee paid straight to the registrar. It should be registered in your name, not your developer's — this matters enormously if you ever change developers.
• Hosting. Most small business sites run comfortably on a free tier. If someone is charging you monthly for hosting a five-page site, ask what specifically requires it.
• Paid third-party services. A booking system, a payment gateway, a premium email platform. These are your ongoing subscriptions, chosen by you.
• Content. Your text and photos. Some studios write copy as a paid add-on; most expect you to supply it. Either is fine — what matters is that you know which before you start.

Fixed price or hourly?

Hourly billing moves all the risk onto you. If the work takes twice as long as expected — because of a technical problem, or because the person is slow, or because the brief kept shifting — you pay for it. You also cannot budget, which for a small business is often the deciding factor.

A fixed price moves that risk onto the studio, which is where it belongs: they are the ones who can estimate the work. The trade-off is that the scope has to be written down. If you ask for something outside it halfway through, expect it to be quoted separately — that is not a scam, it is the mechanism that makes the fixed price possible in the first place.

Either way, get the delivery date in writing alongside the price. A number with no date attached is half a quote.

Real numbers

For comparison, here is what we charge and what each tier includes. Prices are fixed and agreed before any work starts.

Those figures sit well below what an agency in most Western markets would quote for the same scope. That is a function of where we are based, not of how the work is done — the stack, the testing and the delivery process are the same either way.

How to tell a bad quote from a good one

A quote that cannot answer those is not cheaper than one that can — it just moves the cost somewhere you cannot see it yet. The most expensive website is the one you pay for twice.