How much does a website cost, and what are you actually paying for?

How much does a website cost? The most honest answer is: it depends on what it has to do, and that's not dodging the question, it's the heart of the quote. A simple brochure site on a ready-made template costs nothing like a site written around your needs, one that takes orders, checks something on the customer's side and runs its own panel. In this post we break the price down to its parts: what you're actually paying for, what pushes it up, and what you can safely skip.

What drives the price of a website?#

The price of a website depends above all on how much work the site takes off your hands. The more it does on its own (collects orders, checks availability, connects to your systems), the more has to be designed, written and tested. That's why two sites that look alike can differ sharply in price: one only presents the offer, the other also runs it.

• Feature scope. Simply presenting your offer is cheaper than orders, customer logins or availability checks.
• An admin panel and content management. Whether you update the site yourself or pay an outside firm for every change.
• Integrations. Connecting to your inventory, CRM or payments is separate work.
• A ready-made template or custom code. The biggest difference in price, and in what you can do with the site later.
• Content and graphics. Copy, photos and materials ready on your side shorten the project and lower the cost.

A ready-made template or a custom site?#

A ready-made template or WordPress is cheaper up front and perfectly enough for a simple brochure site. A custom site costs more, because we write features around your process instead of bolting them on with plugins. In return, your data stays on your server and the site does exactly what you need. The difference in price pays back only when the site has to do real work, not just look good.

With a template, an unusual feature gets added through a plugin you then have to update and watch, a hidden cost you only notice a year in. With a custom site that feature is part of the code. That's why a per-page price list says little: what matters is what's supposed to happen on that page.

Does an admin panel raise the price?#

An admin panel is an added cost up front, but usually cheaper than the classic outside-firm arrangement where you pay for every small change, which most providers offer. In the panel you change content yourself (news, your offer, pricing, documents), with no developer. What the panel costs depends on what it has to manage: content alone, or orders and customers too.

This is where the difference between a CMS and a CRM begins. A CMS, a content management system, handles what's visible on the site: copy, pricing, news. A CRM manages what happens with the customer: inquiries, orders, history. The closer your panel gets to a CRM, the more work to build it and the higher the price, but also the more the site takes off your plate.

• A CMS manages content: news, your offer, pricing, documents, FAQ.
• A CRM manages the customer relationship: inquiries, orders, contacts, history.
• A custom panel combines both around your process, instead of forcing you into two separate tools.

Which features push the cost up the most?#

What adds the most to the price is what the site does for you or for your customer. A page with text alone is cheap. A feature that checks something, takes something in or connects to something needs design, code and testing. The features we quote most often:

• Checking whether a service or product is available by address or postal code.
• Online orders and inquiries, with a notification to the team.
• A product or service catalog you update yourself in the panel.
• A customer login and their own panel: invoices, tickets, case status.
• A connection to systems you already use: inventory, CRM, a spreadsheet.

Here's a real example. For the internet and TV operator TV-EURO-SAT we built a site where the customer enters an address, checks whether there's coverage, compares packages and orders online, with no call to the office. That's not a brochure with a news tab, so the cost was higher than a brochure, but it takes over part of the customer service that used to run over the phone. A scope like that we quote differently than a simple site, because it does incomparably more.

“After entering an address, the system immediately checks service availability at that location, the customer compares packages and places an order online.”

Bartłomiej Gzowski, CEO, TV-EURO-SAT

Are responsiveness and speed an extra cost?#

No. Working on a phone and loading fast are a standard today, not a paid add-on. A well-built site is designed mobile-first, because most customers will arrive on a phone. A site that loads slowly or displays badly on a phone loses customers before they do anything, and then even the lowest price turns out to be too high.

That's why we build responsiveness and speed into the project rather than tacking them on as an extra: more than half of mobile visitors give up when a page takes too long to load, and most of your customers are on a phone.

How much does a business website cost, and where do you start?#

A business website's price depends on scope, so a real quote comes after we write down what the site has to do, not from a per-page list. Start by listing what your customer repeats today (asks about availability, places an order, looks for a document) and what your team repeats (updates pricing, retypes requests). That list shows whether a simple template is enough or you need a custom site, and what such a site should cost.

If you already know what your site has to do, we can scope it and quote it. See what our custom websites for business involve, look at the TV-EURO-SAT case study, or book a free consultation.