How much a website costs: the ranges from our projects and what influences them

"How much does a website cost?" is the first question on the phone, in eight out of ten calls. The honest answer is that it can't be given without asking two or three questions back, but I understand why this answer is annoying, so below are the actual price ranges.

An important clarification: the figures below are the ranges into which our projects have fallen. They are not a national benchmark. Other agencies have different cost structures, different people, different ways of working — a direct comparison of figures doesn't say who is better.

Ranges from our projects

Landing page, a single page for a campaign: €500-€1,500.

Presentation website, with a few service and portfolio pages: €1,200-€3,500.

More complex website, with custom functionalities — bookings, calculators, client areas: €3,500-€7,000.

Online shop: €3,000-€12,000. The range is the widest because a shop with 30 products and cash on delivery has nothing in common with one with thousands of products, stock synchronisation, and courier integration.

Where we most often found ourselves in practice: in the first half of each range. The upper end almost always means specific functionality, not "better design".

What moves the price, in order of importance for us

How many things need to be built from scratch. An online booking system that links to your calendar and sends reminders is a different discussion from a simple form. This accounts for the biggest part of the price difference.

Integrations. Invoicing, courier services, payments, internal systems. We've been burned a few times by poorly documented courier APIs, where an estimated day turned into four. Now we estimate them with a margin and tell the client it's a high-risk area.

Content. If the texts and photos come from you, the project is cheaper and faster. If we do them — interview, writing, a day of photography — the cost increases, but usually the result also improves, because we no longer launch with placeholder text.

Number of people approving. We don't list it as a separate line item in the quote, but it exists. A project with three associates who can't agree consumes weeks.

What doesn't change the price as much as people think

The number of pages, beyond a certain point. The fifth service page, built on the same template, is little work. That's why it seems strange to us when we receive requests formulated as "I want a 20-page website" — it says almost nothing about the effort involved.

"Better" design is not a price category for us. The difference in visual quality comes from the time spent on actual content and photos, not on effects.

An example calculation

The figures in the example below are invented to show how we calculate, they are not anyone's offer.

Presentation website, five pages, texts written by us based on an interview, photos received from the client, form with request tracking, optimised speed, updated Google business profile. Estimated work: around two weeks from content reception. For a project like this, we usually fell somewhere in the middle of the €1,200-€3,500 range.

If you add online booking connected to a calendar and an automated quoting module to the same project, you move into the next range. Not because we've applied a multiplier, but because there are things to build and test that can go wrong.

Post-launch costs

These are often overlooked in the budget. Hosting and domain, annually. Maintenance and updates, if you don't want anything to break in six months. Content modifications, if you prefer not to do them yourself — that's why we leave a recorded training session with every delivery, so you can.

Adverts, if you start them, are a separate budget and usually higher monthly than maintenance. It's worth saying before signing, not after.

When we tell you not to give us your money

If you need a single page for a campaign, don't get an eight-page website from us. If you have a functional website and the real problem is that you don't appear on the map and have no reviews, perhaps the first budget should go there.

We've recommended exactly this a few times and lost the project. The alternative was to sell something that wouldn't solve the problem.

What we do before quoting

A short call with five or six questions: what do you sell, to whom, who answers the phone, what have you tried so far, what's stopping you today. Then we send a quote detailing what's included and, more importantly, what's not included.

If you want a range for your specific case, tell us what you want the website to do, not how many pages it should have. We'll reply with an estimated category and the missing questions.

What we ask before giving a price range

We can't estimate a website described in two sentences. What we almost always ask is below — and each answer shifts the estimate in a certain direction.

The question about texts is what mostly affects the deadline, not the price.

What's not included in the price of a website

We insist that the domain and hosting be in the client's name. We've taken over too many websites where no one could find the access details from the previous company.

A cheap project where you don't own the domain isn't cheap, it's borrowed.

Why we don't give a price in the first message

Because any figure given before the questions above is a guess, and then comes the unpleasant discussion about "but you said". We prefer a twenty-minute call and a price range we can stick to.

Where we estimated incorrectly

We underestimated a project because we thought the existing texts were usable. They weren't, and rewriting them took almost an unforeseen week. We completed the project at the agreed price, and since then, we ask for three text examples before quoting.

If you want a realistic range for what you have in mind, let's have a quick call and go through the questions above.