What a website costs

"What does a website cost, roughly?" I get that question almost every week. Sometimes by email, sometimes on a call, sometimes over a beer from someone who's just starting out. And the honest answer is always the same: it depends. Which happens to be the answer everyone gives — because, unfortunately, it's true.

I don't want to leave you with that, though. If you're seriously about to spend money on a site, you want a sense of whether you're looking at €500, €5,000, or €50,000. So I'll try to be as concrete as I can here — with the caveat that any number you read anywhere (here included) is just an order of magnitude until someone actually knows your situation.

There's no single number, and anyone who gives you one isn't being straight

Every agency, every freelancer, every website-builder company answers the price question differently — because they're all selling something different. A €19 Wix subscription is technically "a website". An €80,000 custom platform with multilingual CMS, booking logic and ERP integration is also "a website". Between those two, you've got a range that spans almost two orders of magnitude.

What actually sets the price isn't "the website" as a thing. It's a handful of decisions made early:

• Custom design or template? A template costs next to nothing. Something designed for your brand alone costs the time of someone who knows their craft.
• Who writes the copy? Good copy is the biggest hidden cost factor. Bad copy is free — and later, the main reason the site doesn't convert.
• How many pages, how many languages? Linear effort, plain and simple.
• Features, or just presentation? A contact form is cheap. A booking system with availability and payment is its own project.
• Who maintains it afterwards? A CMS you can run yourself costs more to build, but saves money later.

If you can answer those five questions for your project, you can pin the price down to within a few hundred euros. Before that, you can't. And that's exactly why serious providers ask for a first conversation instead of just mailing you a price list.

What a website roughly costs — as an order of magnitude

You still want a number. Here are the bands I typically see in the market, broken down by what you actually end up with. Treat them as a compass, not a quote.

Landing page: usually €500 to €1,500

A single page with a clear focus — one product, one service, one campaign. Shows up, says clearly what you offer, routes enquiries on. Fits freelancers with one well-defined service, product launches, side projects.

What's typically included: responsive layout, basic SEO, a contact form, one or two revision rounds. What's typically not: custom design beyond a clean template, branding built from scratch, multilingual variants.

Business website: usually €2,000 to €8,000

The classic company site with five to fifteen sub-pages: home, about, services, work, contact, often a blog. This is the band most of my own work sits in, and it's also the band where you most need to care about who you're handing your money to.

The difference between €2,000 and €8,000 is almost always: custom design vs template, quality of the copy, whether a self-edit CMS is included, and how much strategic work (SEO, conversion structure, audience clarification) is baked into the price. A €2,000 quote and an €8,000 quote look identical from the outside. They aren't.

Web application: usually €5,000 to €30,000 and up

Anything beyond pure presentation: online shops, booking systems, customer portals, internal tools, integrations with other software. Hard to name an upper bound here, because the complexity is open-ended.

From this scale up, you shouldn't be thinking about "a website" — you should be thinking about "a software project". Different contract types, longer timelines, MVP phases, ongoing maintenance from day one.

What actually drives the price — the line items nobody writes down

Most quotes don't differ in the hourly rate. They differ in which line items get listed at all. A few things that tend to get underestimated or forgotten entirely:

Design decisions. Every "can you make the logo a bit bigger, and maybe shift it towards green?" takes time. If you know what you want, you save money. If you figure it out during the process, that's fine — but it's the single biggest lever on the final price.

Multiple languages. A DE/EN site isn't 1× the cost, it's almost 2× — because every text has to be written twice, every slug maintained, every language tested. Plan it as its own line item, not as "we'll just translate it quickly".

Content. If you already have your copy, images and references — in publishable quality — the price drops sharply. If everything still needs to be produced, by you, by me, or by an external copywriter, it gets noticeably more expensive. The nice side effect: copy you write yourself is often better than copy someone invents for you.

SEO that actually does something. "SEO-optimised" on a quote means nothing. Concrete keyword research, clean structure, performant implementation, schema markup — that's standalone work, and honest quotes list it as such.

Browser and device testing. One quote says: "Works on all devices." Another says: "Tested on iOS Safari, Firefox and Chrome in the last two versions, plus Edge." The second is more expensive. The first is usually a lie.

What keeps running after launch

A website isn't a purchase, it's a purchase plus a subscription. The recurring costs aren't optional:

Together that's €360 to €1,500 per year you need to budget for, even though nobody asks about it at the start. A site that nobody maintains quietly rots — and then the next relaunch becomes urgent, suddenly.

Why €500 often ends up costing €2,000

The most common path to an overpriced website runs through the cheapest provider. It sounds cynical, but it's a story I've heard several times in the last few years: a friend's cousin, someone from the football club, a €200 Fiverr package. Three months later the contact form doesn't work, the site loads slowly, and at the first small change request nobody replies.

Then someone like me comes in and cleans up. Cleaning up almost always costs more than building it properly would have. That's not an argument for buying the most expensive option. It's an argument for pricing honestly what you actually need — and not grabbing the cheapest one because the number looked friendly.

A good website isn't a cost to be minimised. It's a tool meant to bring in enquiries, trust and clients. If it doesn't do that, it was too expensive no matter how cheap it was.

When a website pays for itself

That's the question hiding behind the price question: is it worth it?

My honest answer: for most small businesses, yes — but not immediately, and not on its own. A well-built site isn't a cash machine, it's the precondition for enquiries to arrive at all. Whether they do depends on whether anyone finds it (that's the SEO work), whether it reads as trustworthy after the click (that's design and content), and whether you respond to the enquiries at the end (that's on you).

If you gain two or three extra enquiries a month from your site that you wouldn't have had otherwise, a €4,000 site has paid for itself within a year. Whether you reach those two or three depends on whether you don't just have the site built, but also fill it, maintain it, and promote it.

Anyone promising you the opposite — "build the site, then the clients come on their own" — is selling you something. The realistic path looks different, but it's one you can plan.