How much does a website cost
The spread of prices in web development is enormous, and it regularly leaves clients baffled. A project described as "a website for a business" can cost either $200 or $5,000. The reason is not the contractor's markup but the substance of what is offered. Behind those figures sit four fundamentally different amounts of work.
Four categories of contractor and their prices
The first category is a site built on a ready-made template. An existing theme is taken as the base and the logo, brand colours and text are swapped. This approach clearly wins on speed and price and loses on almost everything else. You get a page that is already installed at a hundred other companies, and how far it can be changed is limited by what the theme's author had in mind. For "we just need to have one" that is enough; for active selling it rarely is.
The second category is assembling the site in a website builder. The project is built on a third-party platform with a monthly fee, and the barrier to entry is minimal. The main risk is that the product effectively remains the platform's property. Moving it elsewhere means rebuilding the whole thing by hand.
The third category is custom development for a specific task. Structure, layout and text are designed around what you sell and who you sell it to. This is the category we work in. A turnkey landing page takes 5 to 10 days, a corporate website 3 to 4 weeks, an online store 4 to 6 weeks. Each project is quoted separately: the figure depends on the number of pages, the complexity of the logic and who prepares the text and photos.
The fourth category is large studios with full specialist departments. An analyst, a designer, a UX specialist, a markup developer, a programmer, a tester and a project manager all work on the project. The process is thorough, and the prices begin where ours end. If the product really is complex and the budget allows, going to such a studio is a sensible choice. Claiming that we do exactly the same amount of work for a third of the price would be dishonest.
What drives the final figure
Within any category three factors drive the total. First comes the number of pages that differ from each other, and what matters is not the page count but the number of distinct layouts. Twenty product cards on one template cost less than three pages with fundamentally different structures. The second factor covers everything you plan to edit yourself: each such block needs an admin interface, and building it is paid for separately. The third factor is integrations with outside services, whether that is taking payment, calculating delivery, a CRM or a warehouse system. Each one works by its own rules and breaks in its own way.
What is usually not included in the price
Ask your contractor separately what the quoted price does not cover. As a rule that leaves out text, photographs, the domain and hosting, filling the catalogue with products and setting up advertising. Text is the single most common reason a finished site sits unpublished for months: development is done and there is nobody to describe the services. Plan time for it in advance, because this stage takes longer than people expect.
Where you can save and where you cannot
Save on the amount of work, not on its level. The first way is to launch on one page instead of eight and add sections as the need appears. The second is to drop complex animation that nobody will see on a phone anyway. The third is not to make editable what changes once a year. Asking a developer to fix a line of text is cheaper than paying for an admin panel for the sake of two edits.
Do not save on loading speed or on the quality of the mobile version. A site that takes eight seconds to open on a phone will never repay any saving made on the markup, because visitors simply never reach the content. Do not save on access to your own project either: the domain and hosting are registered in your name and the source code is handed over in full. Otherwise changing contractor a year later costs more than the entire site did.
How to get a grounded estimate
For a preliminary range we need four answers: what you sell, whether the text and photographs already exist, whether you need a catalogue that takes payment, and what you plan to change yourself. We name the exact figure after reviewing the task and fix it before work begins, so that it does not grow after the fact.