We are not going to publish a price list, because a number without scope is how people end up disappointed. What follows is what actually drives cost.
The options, roughly in order of price
DIY builder. A monthly subscription and your own time. Genuinely fine for a business that needs a presence rather than a channel. The real cost is the hours, and those hours are usually worth more elsewhere.
Template implementation. A designer or developer configuring a commercial template with your content. Fast and predictable.
Custom design and build. Designed around your business, built for your specific requirements. The step up in cost buys fit and, usually, better performance and SEO foundations.
Custom with functionality. Booking systems, portals, calculators, integrations with other software. Cost scales with the functionality rather than the page count.
What actually moves the number
- Page count and content. Not linearly — templates repeat. But a 60-page site is not a 6-page site with more typing.
- Who writes the copy. The most commonly underestimated item. If you do not have content ready, someone has to produce it, and that is a real cost either way.
- Custom functionality. Anything that is not a page: forms with logic, bookings, calculators, member areas.
- Integrations. Connecting to a CRM, accounting system, or industry software. Cost depends entirely on how good the other system's API is.
- Ecommerce. Adds catalog, payments, tax, shipping and fulfilment considerations — see Shopify development.
- Migration. Moving an existing site with rankings means redirect mapping and content transfer, and skipping it is how businesses lose traffic overnight.
What cheap actually costs
The genuinely cheap options are rarely cheap in total. Common patterns: a site built on a platform you cannot export from; a template so common your site looks like three competitors; no SEO foundations, so the site never ranks and every visitor has to be bought; and no handover documentation, so the next developer quotes a rebuild.
None of that is an argument for spending more than you need. It is an argument for asking what happens in year two.
The ongoing costs nobody mentions
- Hosting and domain renewal
- Platform or theme licences
- SSL, backups, and security updates
- Content updates, unless you do them yourself
- Any app or plugin subscriptions the build depends on
Questions worth asking
- What is explicitly not included?
- Who writes the copy, and is that in the price?
- Do I own the site and the code, and can I move it elsewhere?
- What are the ongoing costs in year two?
- What happens if I need a change after launch?
- Is the site built to rank, and what specifically does that involve here?
How to think about it
Work out what one new customer is worth, and how many a year the site would need to produce to justify the spend. For a business where a customer is worth thousands, the calculation is usually easy. For a business with low transaction values, it argues for something simpler and a bigger focus on local search.
More: web design and development, what is a lead generation website.