The price is not the website
A website is not a product with a fixed cost, the way a laptop is. It is a bundle of decisions, and the price mostly reflects how many of those decisions someone else makes for you.
At the cheap end you are buying a template and your own time. At the expensive end you are buying research, custom design, integrations, and someone accountable when it breaks. Most businesses need something in between and get sold one of the extremes.
What the ranges actually mean
Figures below are US dollars and describe the market, not any one agency's rate card. The same brief costs materially different amounts in different countries, so treat these as proportions rather than quotes.
Under $1,000. A template, filled in. This is the right answer more often than agencies admit — if you need a presence rather than a pipeline, a good template beats a bad custom build. What you give up is anything specific to how your business works, and any help when it stops working.
$1,000 to $5,000. A real design against your content, built properly, usually five to eight pages. This is where most small businesses should be. The variable is not page count but whether anyone is doing the thinking: what the site is for, who it is talking to, and what it should make them do.
$5,000 to $20,000. Custom functionality — booking, payments, accounts, dashboards, stock. You are paying for software now, not pages. Scope creep lives here, which is why fixed-price quotes at this level need written scope or they become arguments.
Above $20,000. A product, a platform, or a brand with real stakes. If you are here, you already know why.
The number nobody quotes
The build is the smaller half. A site needs hosting, a domain, certificate renewal, dependency updates, content edits, broken-link fixes, and someone to call when the contact form silently stops delivering — which it will.
Most quotes end at launch. That is the moment the cost stops being visible and starts being your problem. A cheap build with no maintenance plan is usually the expensive option within a year, because the rebuild arrives sooner.
How to compare two quotes honestly
Ask both of them the same four questions:
- What happens the day after launch, in writing?
- Who owns the code, the domain and the accounts?
- What is not included in this price?
- What does a change cost in month six?
The answers separate the quotes far better than the numbers do. A higher price with a written year of management is frequently cheaper than a low quote plus an emergency rebuild.
What we do
We quote a fixed price for your scope, written down before anything starts, and every build carries a full year of management under contract — hosting, updates, fixes and support included, not billed by the hour when something goes wrong.
We deliberately do not publish a headline number, and the ranges above are the market rather than our price list. A five-page site for a clinic in Hyderabad and one for a firm in Berlin are not the same job, and quoting one figure would mean overcharging some clients and frightening off others. Tell us the scope and you get a fixed price in your own currency within 24 hours.