Why the same "website" is quoted at $900 in one place and $80,000 in another, what you are actually paying for, honest ranges by project type, and the recurring cost almost no quote mentions.
You ask three agencies for a quote for "a website". The first says $900, the second $6,000, the third $28,000. None of them is lying. They are simply not selling the same thing, and nothing in the words "a website" lets you tell them apart.
This guide explains what those gaps are made of, gives ranges you can hold up against a salesperson, and names the line item most quotes quietly leave out.
A website is not an object, it is an assembly. The price depends on four variables, and they multiply each other rather than adding up.
The first is how much is custom. A bought template filled in costs the price of the filling in. An interface drawn for your trade costs the price of the thinking, the drawing, the back and forth and the build.
The second is functional complexity. Displaying pages is close to free these days. Handling customer accounts, payments, stock, booking slots or a connection to your back-office software is not.
The third is content. A site delivered with no words and no photographs is not a site, it is an empty template. Many cheap quotes are cheap precisely because they leave that work to you.
The fourth is who does it. A student, a seasoned freelancer and an agency with an art director, a developer and a project manager do not bill the same hour, and do not carry the same risk when something goes wrong.
The heaviest line in a serious project is not the code, it is everything that comes before it: working out who you are talking to, deciding what to put first, arguing about what to cut. A well-considered five-page site converts better than a thirty-page pile, and often costs more to design.
If a quote has no line at all for that phase, you are not buying a website, you are buying layout.
Copy, photographs, translations, product records. This is the most underestimated item and the one that derails the most projects. A shop with 300 products needs 300 descriptions, 300 sets of photographs and 300 records filled in. Nobody does that for free, and if it is not in the quote it will be your evenings.
Price this separately, always. Including when you decide to do it yourself.
Hosting, domain name, certificate, backups, performance, accessibility, data protection compliance. Individually these are small lines. Together they are the difference between a site that lasts three years and one you have to rebuild in eighteen months.
These figures reflect the North American and Western European markets. The absolute amounts vary by country, but the ratios between the categories hold everywhere: from a brochure site to a custom platform there is a factor of ten.
Five to ten pages, a contact form, a presentation of what you do.
Most small business websites land between $500 and $8,000 depending on how much of the work you hand over.
Catalogue, basket, payment, order handling.
The classic trap here is comparing a quote for "shop delivered with 20 products" against one for "shop delivered with your full catalogue imported". That is not the same job.
Customer area, booking, dashboard, internal tool, connections to third-party services.
At this level you are no longer buying a website, you are buying software. The quote should read like a specification, not a list of pages.
Here is the figure to remember. Recurring costs run to 15 to 30 percent of the build budget, every year.
On a $6,000 site that means $900 to $1,800 a year for hosting, the domain, updates, backups, monitoring and small changes. This is not optional: a site left without updates becomes a security hole within months.
Plenty of quotes show an attractive build price and reveal maintenance after signature. Ask for the annual figure before you sign, not after. If it appears nowhere, that is a question to ask, not a gift.
Four checks will head off most nasty surprises.
Who writes the words. If it does not say, it is you. Get it written down.
What the page count actually covers. A category page, a product record and a blog post are not the same work. "10 pages" means nothing without the list.
How many rounds of changes are included. Projects almost always slip here. A serious quote states how many rounds of revisions are covered and what the next one costs.
Who owns the site at the end. You should walk away with your domain name, your hosting credentials and the code. If changing supplier means rebuilding everything, the price on the paper is not the real price.
A seasoned freelancer is often the best value for a brochure site. An agency earns its keep when the project needs several trades at once, when deadlines are contractual, or when continuity matters: a freelancer who falls ill stops the project, a team does not.
Yes, in one specific case: you need to exist online, your customers come from elsewhere, and the site merely confirms you are a real business. No in every other case, because a site that brings you no customers is expensive whatever it cost.
Two to four weeks for a brochure site whose content is ready. Two to four months for a shop. Six months and up for a custom platform. Content is almost always what causes the delay, never the development.
Then comes being found, and that no longer plays out on Google rankings alone: a quarter of searches now display a generated answer. We covered the question separately in our guide to SEO in 2026.
Before you ask for a single quote, write three sentences: what the site should make a visitor do, how much you are willing to invest in the first year including maintenance, and when you want to be live.
With those three sentences, quotes become comparable and the gaps explain themselves. Without them, you are comparing numbers that do not describe the same thing.
That is also the first question we ask at O2Code before pricing anything: not how many pages you want, but what this site is supposed to bring back.
The right question is not which one is best, but which one will cost you least three years from now. What each family charges you once, every month, and on the day you decide to leave.
Read full articleMost projects fail because they start with a tool instead of the bottleneck. Here is the order that holds, what each stage really costs, and how to tell which one applies to you today.
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