What a website actually costs, and why nobody will tell you
Published price lists are either wrong or padded. Here is what genuinely moves the number, so you can read any quotation you are given.
Almost every studio refuses to publish prices, and almost every client finds that infuriating. Both positions are reasonable. A fixed price list is either so padded it insults the small jobs, or so optimistic it collapses on the big ones. But refusing to explain the shape of the cost is just unhelpful. So here is the shape.
What barely moves the price
The number of pages, mostly. Once the design system exists, a tenth page costs a fraction of the first. Studios that quote per page are either using a template or are about to run out of road. Colour schemes, font choices and how many revisions you ask for during the design stage also matter far less than people expect — that is the cheap part of the process, and it is deliberately front-loaded so that changing your mind is still affordable.
What genuinely moves it
- Whether anything has to be saved. A brochure site that simply presents information is one kind of job. The moment you need enquiries stored, users signed in, files uploaded or stock counted, you have a database, a permissions model and a backup story — a different kind of job entirely.
- Whether it has to talk to anything else. Payments, SMS, accounting software, a supplier feed, a delivery partner. Each integration is somebody else’s system with its own rules, its own failures and its own downtime, and each one needs handling for the day it misbehaves.
- Who is allowed to see what. Two roles is a small addition. Five roles with overlapping permissions and an approval chain is a genuine piece of engineering, and it is where most ERP budgets actually go.
- Who writes the words and takes the photographs. This is the single most underestimated line in any quotation. If the content is not ready, the project does not move, and someone has to produce it.
- What happens after launch. A month of snag-fixing is normal and should be included. Ongoing content, campaigns and improvements are a separate arrangement, and pretending otherwise just produces an awkward conversation in month two.
How to read a quotation
A quotation you can trust says what is included, what is explicitly not included, what it assumes you will provide, and what happens if that assumption turns out to be wrong. If the document is a single number with no scope attached, the risk has not disappeared — it has just been moved onto you, and you will meet it later as a change request.
Ask what is excluded before you ask what it costs. The exclusions tell you far more about a studio than the number does.
A fair way to handle uncertainty
Where the scope genuinely is not knowable yet, the honest structure is a short paid discovery stage that produces a specification you own, followed by a fixed quotation against that specification. You end up with a document that any developer could build from, and you are free to take it elsewhere. If a studio will not do that, it is worth asking why.