Website cost: why the same brief gets quotes 20x apart
A practical guide to why website prices scatter so widely, what actually drives the number, and the questions to ask before you accept a quote.
Send the same brief to five agencies and the quotes will come back twenty times apart. That is not because the industry is disorganised. It is because “a website” describes at least five different products at once.
This is not a price list. It explains what sets the number, so you can compare the quotes you receive.
The seven things that set the price
1 · Not page count — template count
The most common mistake is pricing by number of pages. A site with 200 product pages can cost less than a site with 6 different page layouts: those 200 products come out of one template, while 6 layouts mean six designs and six builds.
Ask “how many distinct page templates”, not “how many pages”.
2 · Who updates the content, and how
This single question can double the price.
- A static site is cheapest when content rarely changes. Every edit goes through a developer.
- An off-the-shelf CMS sits in the middle. Cheap to set up, but plugin maintenance is a cost spread across years.
- A custom admin panel is the most expensive. In return, the content team never needs a developer.
If you publish once a month, the third option is waste. If you publish ten times a week, the first option chains you to your developer.
3 · How many languages — and whether they are translations
A bilingual site does not cost twice a monolingual one, but it is not 20% more either. The real driver is whether the languages are structurally the same page.
If the English version sells with a price table and the German version sells with case studies, those are two pages, not a translation. If you do not say this upfront, the quote comes in at translation prices and grows mid-project.
4 · Integrations
What a site does on its own is usually cheap. What costs money is talking to another system: CRM, ERP, accounting, shipping, payments, booking.
The cost of an integration is set by the quality of the other side’s API, and nobody knows that at quoting time. So on integration-heavy projects, ask for a paid discovery phase instead of a fixed price: one week of investigation, then a realistic number.
5 · Where the design comes from
There is a real gap between an off-the-shelf theme, an adapted theme, and design from scratch. Original design is not only an aesthetic preference — it means an identity system, a component library and several rounds of revision.
If your brand is new and you have no identity yet, do not bury that line item in the website budget. Treat it as separate work.
6 · The performance and accessibility target
There is genuine effort between “a site that works” and “a site that passes Core Web Vitals, can be navigated by keyboard and read by a screen reader”.
If you leave that target out of the quote, the price drops and you pay for it later in search results. Write it measurably: LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1.
7 · What happens after handover
Projects do not end at delivery. Who hosts it, who updates it, who do you call when something breaks, and whose account holds the domain and the repository?
Get it in writing. A quote that stays silent here looks cheap until month six, when it turns into a maintenance negotiation.
The hidden line items
Costs that fall outside the quote and surface later:
| Item | Frequency | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | Yearly | Small, but forgotten |
| Hosting / CDN | Monthly | Static sites often fit the free tier |
| SSL certificate | Yearly | Free with modern providers |
| Transactional email | Monthly | For forms and notifications |
| Stock imagery / font licences | One-off | Commercial licence is mandatory |
| Content production | Throughout | The most commonly skipped item |
| Maintenance | Monthly | Not optional on a CMS site |
Content production matters most. The site finishes, then sits unlaunched for three months because the copy is not ready. That is both a delay and an investment you have paid for that is earning nothing.
Six questions to ask before signing
- How many distinct page templates are there?
- Who updates content, and with what tool?
- Which systems will it integrate with — have you read their API docs?
- Is the performance target written into the quote, and measured how?
- At handover, whose accounts hold the domain, repository and hosting?
- What is covered if something breaks in the first three months?
A quote that answers these six in writing is cheaper than one that does not, even at a higher number. The one that stays silent collects the difference later.
So which tier do you pick
A shortcut: the more the site matters, the more expensive saving money gets.
If the site is a business card, an off-the-shelf theme is an entirely reasonable choice. If the site is the first step of your sales pipeline — a visitor arrives from a search result and fills in a form — then speed, measurement and integrations stop being aesthetic details and become revenue.
Decide with this question: what would it cost me if this site ran slowly for a week? If the answer is a serious number, move up a tier.
