Ask three studios to quote the same website and you can receive numbers that differ by a factor of ten. That is not necessarily anyone being dishonest — it usually means they are quoting different things.
This article will not give you a price list, because a price list would be a guess. What it can do is show you the factors that genuinely move the cost of a project, so you can read any proposal — ours included — and understand exactly what you are paying for.
Why there is no standard price
A website is not a product with a barcode; it is a bundle of decisions. How many pages, how bespoke the design, who writes the content, what the site has to do, what it has to connect to, and who looks after it afterwards. Two 'five-page websites' can honestly differ in cost by a factor of five once those decisions are made.
So when a quote seems surprisingly cheap or surprisingly expensive, the useful question is not 'why that number?' but 'what did they assume?' The rest of this article is a tour of those assumptions.
The factors that move the price
| Factor | Website A | Website B |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | 5 | 5 |
| Unique layouts | 2 templates | 5 bespoke layouts |
| Content | Supplied by you | Written and photographed |
| Functionality | Contact form | Bookings, logins, payments |
| Integrations | None | CRM, accounting, inventory |
| After launch | Self-managed | Care plan |
Scope: how many pages, how many layouts
Cost tracks design effort more than page count. Ten pages sharing two well-designed templates cost far less than five pages that each need a unique layout. When you brief a project, a rough sitemap helps far more than a page number. This is also why a website redesign is often priced by the templates that change, not the pages that exist.
Design complexity
A refined but conventional design costs less than one with custom illustration, animation and bespoke interactions on every screen. Neither is wrong — a distinctive design is an investment in standing out — but it is a genuine cost driver, and worth deciding consciously rather than by accident.
Content: the quiet schedule-killer
Who writes the words and supplies the photography? Content produced on your side lowers the cost but is the most common cause of delay we see. Content produced professionally raises the cost and usually raises the quality. The expensive option is deciding late.
Functionality
The steepest cost curve of all. A contact form is trivial; bookings, payments, member logins, portals and dashboards are software development, and they are built, tested and secured accordingly. Every 'could it also…' is a fair question to ask — just know that functionality, more than anything else, is what turns a website into an application.
Integrations
Connecting the website to your CRM, booking platform, accounting software or inventory system varies from an afternoon of work to a sub-project in its own right, depending mostly on the quality of the other system's interface. List your systems early; surprises here are expensive.
E-commerce
Online stores add product data, payment and shipping configuration, tax rules and a checkout that has to feel trustworthy under pressure. The range is wide: a focused Shopify store is a very different project from a custom storefront with thousands of products.
Ongoing costs after launch
A website also carries running costs: hosting, domain renewal, any platform or plugin licences, and maintenance. These are modest compared with the build, but they are real, and a proposal that never mentions them is incomplete. Who owns those accounts matters as much as what they cost — Website ownership and hosting: what should your business own? covers who should hold what.
How to get a quote you can trust
- Share your goals and budget range honestly — a good studio designs to it, or tells you it is not feasible, rather than quietly cutting quality.
- Provide a rough sitemap and a list of must-have functionality.
- Say who is producing the content, and be realistic about it.
- List every system the site must connect to.
- Ask what is excluded, and what the ongoing costs will be.
A proposal built on those answers can be specific. One built without them is a guess with a margin added — and the margin is yours to pay.