Real price ranges for every kind of website — brochure, ecommerce, custom application — plus what actually drives the number up, what you should refuse to pay for, and the running costs nobody mentions until after you have signed.
Almost every agency answers this question with 'it depends', which is true and useless. It does depend — but the ranges are knowable, the things that move you between them are knowable, and you are entitled to understand both before you talk to anyone. This is our honest attempt at the whole answer, including the parts that are awkward for us to say.
The ranges, plainly
A small brochure site — five to ten pages, a contact form, a content management system you can update — sits in the low thousands of dollars from a competent professional. A larger marketing site with custom design, fifteen to thirty pages, proper SEO structure and some bespoke functionality typically runs several times that. An ecommerce store depends almost entirely on catalogue complexity: a straightforward store on an established platform starts around the upper end of the brochure range, while one with variable products, customer-specific pricing, several integrations and a large catalogue is a different order of project. A custom web application — logins, dashboards, workflows, something nobody sells off the shelf — starts where the ecommerce range ends and climbs from there, because you are paying for software rather than a site.
Why the same brief gets wildly different quotes
Because the quotes are not for the same thing. The cheapest number is usually a template with your logo in it, the content you supplied pasted in, and no testing beyond a glance. The middle number is custom design on a standard platform with a real process. The highest is custom software. All three are legitimate purchases; the problem is that they look identical in a one-line proposal. When you compare quotes, compare the scope lines, not the totals — how many unique page designs, who writes the content, what happens on mobile, how many revision rounds, what testing is included, and what happens after launch.
What genuinely drives the price up
Four things, in roughly this order. First, the number of genuinely distinct page designs — twelve pages built from three templates is a fraction of the work of twelve bespoke layouts. Second, integrations: every external system you connect to is a negotiation with someone else's API and someone else's edge cases. Third, content: if you are supplying finished copy and photography the project is dramatically cheaper than if someone has to create them, and content is the single most common reason projects stall. Fourth, bespoke functionality — anything where the answer to 'is there a standard way to do this' is no.
The running costs nobody mentions
The build price is not the cost of owning a website. Budget for hosting, which ranges from trivial for a small site to significant for a busy store. A domain. An SSL certificate, which should be free and included. Email hosting if you need addresses on your domain. Licences for any premium plugins or themes, which are usually annual and quietly renew. And maintenance — security updates, backups, plugin compatibility, the occasional thing that breaks because something upstream changed. A site with no maintenance budget is not cheaper; it is a site that will be expensive and urgent in eighteen months instead of modest and planned every month. That is the reasoning behind our website maintenance plans.
What you should refuse to pay for
Some charges are normal and some are a tell. You should not pay a premium to own your own code, domain or hosting account — those should be yours from the start, in your accounts, without asking. You should not be charged for fixing something that was broken on delivery. You should be wary of an open-ended hourly arrangement with no estimate and no cap, because it transfers every risk to you. And you should treat a guaranteed ranking position as a reason to walk away, because nobody controls Google's results and anyone claiming otherwise is either misinformed or lying.
Cheap is sometimes correct
It is worth saying plainly, even though it costs us work: if you need a simple, credible presence and you have the time and patience, a well-chosen template on a mainstream platform will genuinely serve you, and it will cost a fraction of a custom build. The case for paying more is specific — you need something a template cannot do, you need it to perform commercially rather than merely exist, you need it built so it can be extended, or your time is worth more than the difference. If none of those apply, buy the cheap thing with a clear conscience. We would rather tell you that than sell you a project you did not need.
How to brief so the quote is accurate
You will get far better numbers if you arrive with four things. A list of the pages or screens you think you need. Examples of two or three sites you like and, more usefully, why. An honest statement of what the site has to achieve — enquiries, orders, bookings, credibility — because that changes the design decisions. And the state of your content: do you have copy and photographs, or does someone need to make them. A brief with those four elements can be quoted properly. Without them, every agency is guessing, and guesses are padded.
How we price, since it would be odd not to say
We publish prices on every service page and quote fixed rather than hourly, so the number on the quote is the number on the invoice. Scope changes are quoted as written variations before anyone starts them. You own the code, the hosting account and the domain from day one, in your own accounts. If you want a rough figure before speaking to anyone, the estimator on this site will give you a range in a couple of minutes, and the packages page lists what is included at each tier.
The honest summary is that a website is a range rather than a price, that the range is driven mostly by design count, integrations, content and bespoke functionality, and that the running costs are real and worth planning for. Anyone who gives you a figure before asking what you need is guessing — which is why our quotes are itemised, fixed and free, and come back within one business day. If you would like one, tell us what you are trying to build, or start with the web development and ecommerce pages to see where your project is likely to land.
Code Craft
Client Services at Code Craft — the team behind our published work and products and the 39-plugin product suite.