Send the same brief to five agencies and you will get five very different numbers. That is not necessarily dishonesty — it usually means five different interpretations of what you asked for. Understanding what actually drives the price makes it much easier to tell a realistic quote from a hopeful one.
We are not going to publish a price list here, because a number without a scope is meaningless. What we can do is explain what moves the number, so that the quotes you receive become comparable.
What actually drives the cost
1. Templates, not pages
The instinct is to count pages. What matters is how many different page designs are needed. Fifty service pages that share one template cost far less than eight pages that each need their own layout. When you brief an agency, describe the types of page rather than the total count.
2. Custom design versus adapted theme
A bought theme with your colours applied is the cheapest route and it will look like what it is. A custom design costs more because someone designs every template around your content and your customers. Between them sits a middle path: custom design for the pages that carry your traffic and revenue, simpler templates for the rest. This is usually the best value.
3. Content
This is the most underestimated line in every project. If your copy and photography are ready, the build moves quickly. If they are not, someone has to write and source them, and that someone is either you or the agency at an additional cost. Projects rarely stall on code; they stall waiting for the About page copy.
4. Integrations
A contact form is trivial. A booking system with availability rules, a CRM sync, a payment gateway, an ERP connection or a customer portal are each a small project of their own. Every integration adds discovery, build time and testing, and each one can be broken by a change at the other end later.
5. Migration and SEO protection
Rebuilding an existing site is not the same as starting fresh. Content has to move, URLs have to be mapped, redirects written and rankings monitored. On a large site this is genuine work, and skipping it is how businesses lose years of search traffic in a weekend.
A quote without a scope is not a quote
Any estimate should say how many templates are designed, who writes the content, which integrations are included, and what happens if something is added later. If it does not, the low number is not a saving — it is a gap that will surface as a change request.
The costs people forget
- Hosting, renewed annually, sized for your traffic
- Domain renewal, and an SSL certificate if it is not included
- Paid plugins, apps or licences, most of them billed yearly
- Maintenance: updates, backups, security monitoring
- Content updates after launch, and the person who makes them
- Analytics, tracking and any marketing tools you connect
None of these is large on its own. Together they are the difference between a site that stays healthy and one that quietly decays until it needs rebuilding again in three years.
Where it is safe to save money
- Launch with fewer pages and add more once you know what people search for
- Write the first version of the content yourself and have it edited
- Use good stock photography for supporting pages and invest in real photos where it matters
- Start with a simpler integration and automate more later
- Skip the animation-heavy homepage nobody asked for
Where saving money costs more
- Cheap shared hosting for a store — it shows up as slow product pages
- Skipping the redirect map in a migration
- No maintenance plan, until the day something breaks
- A design chosen before anyone decided what the page has to say
- Paying per hour with no agreed scope
Fixed price or hourly?
For a defined project — a website with an agreed set of templates — a fixed price protects you. You know the number, and the risk of the estimate being wrong sits with the agency rather than with your budget.
Hourly work makes sense for open-ended improvement: a retainer for ongoing changes, or exploratory work where nobody can scope the outcome honestly. What does not make sense is hourly billing on a project everyone claims to understand. That is usually a scope nobody wanted to write down.
Red flags in a quote
- A single number with no scope, timeline or deliverables listed
- No mention of who writes the content
- A price far below everyone else, with the same promises
- “Unlimited revisions”, which in practice means unlimited delay
- No line for what happens after launch
- A redesign quote that never mentions redirects or existing URLs
How payments usually work
Most studios, including us, work in stages: a deposit to start, one or two payments tied to milestones such as design approval, and a final payment at launch. It keeps both sides honest — you are never far ahead of the work, and we are never far ahead of the invoice.
Be cautious of anyone asking for the full amount up front, and equally cautious of anyone who does not ask for a deposit at all. Both usually signal a business that will not be there in six months.
The cheapest expensive mistake
The most expensive website is the one built twice. It usually happens because the first build was chosen on price, the scope was never written down, and the result could not be maintained by the people who inherited it.
Spending 20 per cent more on a build that is properly scoped, documented and handed over is almost always cheaper across three years than saving that money and rebuilding in eighteen months.
How to compare quotes fairly
Ask every agency the same five questions: How many templates are designed? Who writes the content? Which integrations are included? What happens to our existing URLs? What does month thirteen cost? The answers will tell you more than the headline number, and they usually explain the entire price gap between two proposals.
Then ask one more: what would you remove from this project if the budget were smaller? A good answer shows that they understand which parts drive results — and which parts were there because they are easy to sell.
