What Does a Website Actually Cost?

Ask ten agencies what a website costs and you’ll get ten different answers, all of them technically true. The honest reply is: it depends on what the site has to do. That’s not a dodge. A website is priced by its job, not by a page count — so the way to judge any quote is to understand the job first.

What actually moves the price

A handful of things drive most of the cost:

• Scope. A five-page site that explains a service is a different animal from a fifty-page site with booking, payments and member logins.
• Custom design vs a template. A recognisable theme is cheap and fast. A site designed around your business — and not mistakable for anyone else’s — takes more work, and it’s worth more.
• Ecommerce and integrations. Payments, inventory, a CRM, email tools, booking systems. Every connection adds build and testing time.
• Content. Words and images either come from you or someone has to make them. “We’ll supply the content” and “please write it for us” are very different budgets.
• Who builds it. A DIY builder is nearly free in cash and expensive in your time. A freelancer sits in the middle. An agency costs more but carries the strategy, the edge cases and the accountability.

DIY, freelancer or agency?

None of these is the “right” answer. They fit different moments.

DIY suits a brand-new venture testing an idea on a tiny budget. Just count the hours honestly — they’re real, and they’re yours. A freelancer is a good fit for a contained, well-defined build when you already know roughly what you want. An agency earns its keep when the site has to perform: convert visitors, get found, integrate with your tools, and keep doing it after launch.

The mistake isn’t picking the cheap option or the expensive one. It’s picking the cheap option for a job that needed the expensive one, then paying twice.

The number that actually matters

Cost is the wrong lens. A website is a tool for bringing in business, so the real question is what it brings back. A €1,500 site that books two extra jobs a month has paid for itself within weeks. A €400 site that converts nobody is the expensive one — it just hides the bill.

So when you read a quote, don’t only ask “is this cheap?” Ask “what is this built to return, and does the price make sense against that?” Your website is the first step of marketing — every euro you later spend on traffic runs through it. That’s exactly why under-investing here quietly costs the most.

A realistic starting point

For context: our own builds start at €800, and every project is scoped to the goal rather than dropped into a fixed tier. Some sites need far less than owners fear. Some need more than a template can carry. The honest version is a real number after a short conversation, not a guess off a price list.

If you want a straight figure for your situation, with no vague ranges, tell us what you’re working on and we’ll give you one.