Asking what a website costs is like asking what a building costs. The honest answer is another question: what kind, for whom, and who maintains it afterwards. That is not evasion. It is the only way the number becomes useful.
What follows is not a price list. It is the set of things that make the number move, and the recurring costs that are missing from most quotes.
What actually drives the price
Four variables explain most of the spread between two proposals.
The type of site comes first. A five-page brochure site and a catalogue with ten thousand references do not represent the same volume of work, and no amount of negotiation changes that. Second, how much of the design is bespoke: a lightly adjusted template and a layout drawn for your business are different products. Third, who writes the content, which is the single most underestimated line in the whole project. Fourth, whether search optimisation is built in or sold afterwards as an extra.
When two quotes differ by a factor of five, they are almost always describing two different projects. Put the scopes side by side before putting the numbers side by side.
The four recurring costs that are missing from your budget
Hosting. From a few euros a month on shared infrastructure, which is fine for a brochure site, to a hundred or more for a store with real traffic.
The domain name. Small, annual, and the one people forget to renew.
Technical maintenance. Updates, security fixes, monitoring. On a platform with a large plugin surface this is not optional: it is what stands between you and an incident.
Ongoing search work. Positions are not acquired once. A site that stops being worked on drifts down while competitors keep publishing.
A workable rule of thumb: plan an annual budget of around 15 to 20 % of the initial build cost. A site bought as a one-off starts degrading the month it launches.
Custom build or subscription platform
This is where the three-year view changes the answer. Shopify publishes 29 to 299 dollars per month depending on the plan, plus transaction fees on every sale, and customisation stays inside what the platform permits. A custom build concentrates the spend at the start and then stops.
Over three years, once subscriptions and commissions are counted, custom frequently comes out lower, and the gap grows with sales volume. Below a certain volume the platform wins on simplicity alone. The point is not that one is better, it is that the comparison is meaningless at month one and obvious at year three.
How to compare two quotes properly
Ask what the quote excludes before asking what it includes. Content writing, photography, training, redirects from the old site, and support after launch are the four lines where proposals quietly diverge.
Then ask who owns what at the end: the code, the domain, the hosting account, the analytics. If leaving your provider means starting from zero, the price on the quote is not the price of the project.
Finally, be suspicious of the very low quote for the same reason you would be suspicious of a very low building estimate. It rarely removes cost. It moves it into your future.
Start from your own numbers
Before requesting any quote, it helps to know where your current site stands. Our free audit tool measures it in seconds, with no signup and no email address: tags, indexability, mobile, structured data, response time.
With those figures in hand, a quote stops being an opaque number and becomes a list of things to fix. If you want ours, describe your project and we reply in writing, by email, with no meeting.
