What a custom website actually costs

Most agencies will not put a number on a website until you have sat through a discovery call. We publish ours, so here is the honest version, including the parts that usually stay quiet until the invoice.

The short answer

A bespoke website starts at 4,500 dollars. A website with the CRM and automation wired in behind it starts at 7,500. Anything involving a client portal, an ERP integration or AI tooling is priced by scope, because a login system and a SAP connector are not the same job.

Those are floors, not quotes. The exact number gets fixed on a call once we know what the thing has to do.

Why almost nobody publishes prices

Three reasons, and only one of them is good.

The good one: the same brief genuinely can be a two week build or a six month programme. "A website for a consultancy" covers a five page brochure and a multi region site with gated content and a partner login. A single published price would be wrong for one of them.

The other two are not good. Some agencies price on what they think you can pay, which is why the number arrives after they have asked about your funding. Others do not know their own costs well enough to commit to anything in writing.

You can usually tell which you are dealing with by how early the money question comes up, and in which direction.

What actually moves the price

Factor	Effect	Why
Page count	Small	Templates do the work after the first few
Unique layouts	Large	Each one is design plus build plus testing
Content	Large	Writing is a different job from building
Integrations	Large	Each is a contract with someone else's API
Migration	Varies	Depends entirely on what you are leaving
Deadline	Medium	A hard date means more people at once

Page count is what clients ask about first and it matters least. Integrations are what clients mention last and they matter most.

A twelve page site with one contact form is a smaller job than a five page site that has to talk to HubSpot, take payments and sync a booking calendar. The page count says almost nothing.

What you get at each level

Rough shapes rather than fixed packages.

Around 1,500 to 3,000. A template, lightly customised. Your logo, your colours, your words in someone else's layout. Fine for a first site or a side project. It will look like other sites, because it is.

Around 4,500 to 8,000. A bespoke design built to a real structure. Written for your buyer, fast, editable by your team, with proper SEO groundwork. This is where most professional service firms should be.

Around 8,000 to 20,000. The above plus the systems behind it. CRM wiring, lead routing, automated quotes and onboarding, reporting that pulls itself together.

Above 20,000. Portals, logins, custom tooling, integrations with software that was not designed to be integrated with.

If someone quotes 900 dollars for the third bracket, they have misunderstood the brief or you have.

The costs that are not in the quote

These catch people out, on every project, everywhere.

Content. Somebody writes the words and finds the photos. If it is not in your quote, that somebody is you. It is the single most common reason a project runs late.

Stock photography and fonts. Small, but licences are real and they expire.

Hosting and domains. Ongoing, usually modest.

Maintenance. Updates, backups, security patching. On a plugin heavy platform this is a few hours every month, forever.

Changes after launch. There will be some. Agree what they cost before you need one, not after.

Your own time. Feedback, approvals, gathering assets. Budget a few hours a week during the build.

Add 20 to 30 percent to any quote and you will be nearer the true figure.

Why cheap gets expensive

A 500 dollar template is not a 4,000 dollar saving. It is a bill you have delayed.

You pay it when you need a page the template does not do. When a plugin update breaks the layout. When you discover the contact form has been silently failing for five weeks, which is more common than anyone admits.

Work out the real comparison instead. Take the build cost, add three years of maintenance, then subtract what the site earns. A site that converts 1 percent instead of 3 percent, on a thousand visitors a month, is losing you twenty enquiries a month. Price that against the saving and the cheap option usually stops looking cheap.

Fixed price or hourly

We only work fixed price, and it is worth explaining why.

Hourly protects the builder. If the work takes longer, you pay more. All the risk of a bad estimate sits with you, and you cannot budget properly because nobody will tell you the total.

Fixed price moves that risk to us. If we scope it wrong, that is our problem to absorb. It forces us to understand the job properly before quoting, which is work that has to happen anyway.

The trade is that the scope has to be real before we start. That means a proper conversation up front rather than a vague brief and an open meter.

How payment usually works

Standard across most of the industry, and worth knowing so you can spot when something is off.

Fifty percent up front. This holds your slot and covers the work before anything is visible. A builder asking for nothing up front is either very established or about to disappear.

Fifty percent at launch. Paid when the site goes live, not thirty days later. Some agencies split the back half into a milestone and a launch payment on longer projects.

Extras billed separately. Content writing, photography, licences.

What should make you pause: full payment up front, staged payments with no deliverable attached to them, or a deposit that is described as non refundable without any scope written down.

We take 50 percent to start and 50 percent at launch, and the launch payment comes after we have sent the speed, SEO and mobile reports. You should be able to see the thing works before you pay the rest of it.

Why prices vary so much by country

A site built in London, Sydney or New York costs more than the same site built in Warsaw, Manila or Pune. Rates follow local salaries, not local quality.

That gap is real, and it is why offshore development exists. It is also why the range in any search result looks impossible to make sense of.

Two things to hold on to. Quality does not track price across regions. There are excellent teams at every rate and poor ones too. And timezone difference costs you something real in a project with lots of feedback, which is worth pricing in if the gap is more than five or six hours.

We are based in India and we work with clients across six countries, so we sit in the middle of this. Our prices are higher than local Indian rates and lower than London agency rates, for the same work.

If the budget is not there yet

A straight answer, because pretending otherwise wastes everyone's time.

If you have under 2,000 dollars, do not hire an agency. A good freelancer or a well chosen template will serve you far better. Come back when the site has a job to do that justifies more.

If you have some budget but not enough for everything, phase it. Build the pages that earn money first. Homepage, the main service page, proof, and a contact route that works. Add the blog, the resource library and the clever bits later.

What does not work is asking for the full scope at half the price. Something gets cut, and it is usually the part you cannot see, like testing, speed work or the SEO groundwork. Those are the parts that decide whether the site earns anything.

Questions to ask any quote

Ask all four, of everyone, and compare the answers rather than the numbers.

1. What exactly is included, page by page?
2. Who is writing the content?
3. What does a change cost once we have started?
4. What do I own at the end, and what happens if we part ways?

Three quotes at very different prices are almost never quoting the same job. These questions are what reveal the difference. If you are still deciding who should build it at all, we compared agency, freelancer and in-house side by side.

How we quote

Fixed scope and fixed price, both signed before anyone writes a line of code. No hourly meter and no change order games.

If your budget and the work do not line up, we say so on the call rather than padding the scope to fit. Sometimes that means pointing you at a freelancer, and that is a better outcome for everyone than a project that was underfunded from day one.