WHAT THINGS COST
How much does a website cost?
The most searched question in this industry, and the one almost nobody answers with a number.
Short answer
A five to seven page business website costs $3,500 and takes three weeks. That is a published price rather than a range: the scope is a list you can read before paying, and the number does not move after a call.
Why every other answer is a range
Search this question and you get "$500 to $50,000", which is true and useless. The range is wide because the question hides four different products: a single page, a brochure site, a store that takes money, and an application people log into. Those are not sizes of the same thing, they are different things, and each one has a different floor.
Naming which one you mean collapses the range immediately. A one-page site is a day of design and a day of build. An application is a database, authentication and a deployment that has to stay correct after a thousand people have used it. Quoting both from the same sentence is how the $500 to $50,000 answer happens.
What $3,500 buys
Up to seven pages with a custom design system rather than one layout stretched over seven pages, which is the difference that shows on page six. No content management system, because a seven-page site that updates twice a year does not need a database, an admin panel and a login to maintain. Clean markup, structured data, a sitemap and page titles that differ from each other. Three consolidated revision rounds across the project.
It does not buy ongoing search work, hosting, e-commerce, memberships, or content written for you. Those are named on the package page rather than discovered later.
What makes it cost more
Anything that stores or changes data pushes a site into application territory, and the floor there is $7,500. Taking payments, letting people log in, personalising what a visitor sees, or replacing a spreadsheet the business currently runs on are all that move rather than a bigger version of a website.
Volume moves it too, but less than people expect. Extra pages after the first seven are cheap, because the design system already exists and the second twenty pages are assembly rather than design. Languages, on the other hand, are not cheap: a second language is a second set of copy, a second set of URLs and a second thing to keep correct forever.
What makes it cost less
One page instead of seven. If you are testing an offer or pointing paid traffic somewhere, a landing page at $1,200 does the job in seven days and tells you whether the offer works before you spend four times as much finding out.
Having your content ready also helps, though not in the way people assume: it does not reduce the price, it reduces the elapsed time. A delivery clock pauses while it waits for copy, and most projects that run late ran late here.
The costs that are not the build
Domain registration and hosting are paid by you, directly, to whoever provides them, and they are not large. Commercial font licences and stock assets are the two that surprise people, because a typeface that looks free in a design tool often is not licensed for a website.
Search work is separate and ongoing. A site built with a technical SEO foundation is a site that can rank; it is not a site that will, and anyone charging a build fee on the promise that it does is selling two things as one.
How to compare two quotes
Ask for the scope as a list rather than a paragraph, and ask what is explicitly excluded. A studio that cannot write the exclusions down has not decided what it is selling. Ask who owns the code when the final invoice is paid, and whether the site can be hosted anywhere or only with them. Ask what one revision round means, because "unlimited revisions" usually means unlimited small ones and a new quote for anything real.
Then compare the numbers. If one is much lower, the difference is almost always a template, an offshore subcontract, or a scope that ends before the parts you assumed were included.
What moves the number
- Pushes it up
- Logins, payments, stored data, a second language, content production
- Pushes it down
- One page instead of several, content ready before the start, an existing design system
- Does not move it much
- Extra pages after the first few, your industry, where you are in the world
The packages behind these numbers
Each one lists its full scope, what it excludes and how the work runs.