Ask ten agencies what a website costs and you will hear numbers from a few hundred dollars to six figures. Every one of them can be honest. The spread is not because the industry is making it up — it is because "a website" describes a hundred different projects, and the price follows the project, not the word.
The useful question is not "what does a website cost?" but "what does my website cost?" You can get surprisingly close to that answer yourself, before you speak to anyone, if you know which eight decisions actually move the number. That is what this guide covers — and what our free website cost calculator scores for you in about two minutes.
Why online price lists rarely match your quote
Most "website pricing" pages list packages by page count: five pages for one price, ten for another. Page count is real, but it is rarely the thing that doubles a budget. Two ten-page sites can differ by a factor of three because one needs a booking integration, custom design and written copy, and the other needs none of those.
A good estimate works the way a good quote does: it starts from scope. Name what the site must do, who will run it, and what it has to connect to, and the price range narrows quickly.
Page count is the least interesting number in a website quote. Integrations, design and copy are where budgets actually move.
The eight questions that set the price
These are the same questions our calculator asks, in roughly the order of how much they move the number.
1. How many pages, really?
Count templates, not just pages. Twenty location pages that share one layout are far cheaper than twenty pages that each need their own design. Up to around a dozen pages, page count barely matters; past twenty-five it starts to, mostly because of content and QA time.
2. Template, reworked template, or custom design?
A theme used close to how it ships is the cheapest route and the most limiting. A custom design costs more up front because someone is designing for your buyers and your content rather than adapting someone else's. We explain the trade-off in WordPress vs a custom website.
3. Will it sell anything?
Inquiries-only is the baseline. A handful of products adds a cart and checkout; a full catalog with variants adds product modeling, filtering and a lot of testing. Subscriptions, configurators and trade pricing are their own category of work.
4. Who will edit it after launch?
If nobody touches the site, the editing experience barely matters. If your team publishes every week, it needs a content model, sensible templates and training — that is real build time, and it pays back every week afterwards.
5. What does it connect to?
CRMs, email marketing, payments, booking, inventory, members' areas, custom APIs. Each one is a line on the quote, and each one is a range until someone has read the other system's documentation. This is the single biggest source of surprise in web budgets.
6. Who writes the words?
Final copy supplied ready to place is the cheapest option. Drafts that need editing come next. Writing everything from interviews is the most expensive, and usually the best value: copy is what turns visits into inquiries.
7. How much SEO is in scope?
On-page basics should be in every build. Full technical and on-page work at launch — redirects, structured data, keyword-to-page mapping — costs more and protects the rankings you already have. An ongoing program is a separate monthly line, not part of the build.
8. How fixed is the deadline?
A target date with some room costs nothing extra. A fixed date that is sooner than is comfortable means more people working in parallel, and that is reflected in the price.
What those answers add up to
For reference, our own fixed-price tiers start at $1,850 for a Launch site (about 2 weeks from kickoff), $3,900 for Growth, and $7,200 for Platform builds with commerce or integrations. They are fixed against an agreed scope — the figures below are where each tier starts, not an average.
Starting price, US dollars
| Launch | 1,850 |
|---|---|
| Growth | 3,900 |
| Platform | 7,200 |
Starting prices from our pricing page. Your scope decides where in a tier you land.
If your answers are mostly the first option in each question, you are likely in the first band. Two or three integrations, a custom design and written copy usually put a project in the second. Commerce, a large content inventory or a headless front end is the third. See the full pricing breakdown for what each tier includes.
Costs people forget to budget for
- Hosting and the domain. Small, but recurring. Ask who owns the accounts — it should be you.
- Maintenance. Updates, backups and security patching. Unmaintained sites break, quietly.
- Photography. Real photos of your team and work outperform stock, and nobody can take them for you.
- Migration. If your current site ranks, the redirect map is not optional. We cover it in replacing a website without losing rankings.
- Your own time. Reviews, feedback and approvals. A single decision-maker is the cheapest thing in any project.
How to turn an estimate into a real quote
- Write down the one thing the site must produce — calls, booked jobs, sales, applications.
- List what it has to connect to, and who owns each of those systems.
- Decide who writes the copy, honestly.
- Ask for a fixed price against that scope, with what is out of scope written down.
- Compare quotes on scope, not on the total. The cheapest quote is often the one that left something out.
For the questions worth asking before you sign anything, see ten questions to ask a web agency, and for the line items behind a quote, what moves a website quote up or down.
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