How much does a website cost?

The most common question I get is: “How much does a website cost?”

And the engineer’s answer, cliché as it is, is: it depends.

But why does it depend? And what’s the real range you should expect?

In this article I’ll debunk the myths, explain the real costs of a modern website, and give you concrete criteria for evaluating proposals — whether from me or from someone else or an agency.

Spoiler: a lot of people are afraid to quote a price, because cheap websites fail and very expensive websites are speculation. The truth is in the middle, and it’s more predictable than it looks.

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Why it depends

A website’s price doesn’t depend on the number of pages, it depends on what it needs to do. A simple institutional site — who you are, what you do, how to contact you — is a small project. A site with bookings, payments, user accounts or integrations with other systems is a different project, with different effort and different maintenance.

Before asking anyone for a price, it’s worth having clear answers to: what the site needs to do on the day it goes live and open to the public, what isn’t that important and can wait for later, and who’s going to keep this content updated.

What you’re buying when you choose a Wix (or another builder)

There’s nothing wrong with using a Wix, Squarespace or WordPress with a template — they’re cheaper and go live faster, and for many businesses that’s enough. But you’re essentially buying a template: the customization options are whatever the platform decided to give you (or charges you extra for), the performance and technical SEO structure are whatever the platform decided to build, and the site will, in some way, look like thousands of other sites made with the same tool.

What changes when the site is built from scratch

When I build a site from scratch, instead of configuring a template, I solve the whole problem to fit you: design built for your business instead of squeezed into a generic grid, no ceiling on the features I can add later, real technical local SEO (so you show up in searches from people looking for your service in your area), and already built for how search engines and AI assistants read and cite pages today.

The result is usually a site you’re proud to show — to clients, to partners, to whoever visits for the first time — and that’s not a minor detail: a site you trust is a site you actually use in your marketing, instead of it sitting forgotten just because “you’re supposed to have one.”

How to evaluate a proposal (mine or anyone else’s)

• What’s included in the price, and what’s left out? Domain, hosting, maintenance, changes after launch — all of this should be explicit.
• Who owns what? Code, content and domain should always be yours, never held hostage by a platform or by whoever built the site.
• How long does it take, and what happens if you need a change six months from now?
• Do you find the result presentable? If you’re not proud of the site, a lower price doesn’t make up for it.

How I structure pricing

The price I give you covers delivering the site. After that, one-off changes or ongoing support are separate, through a simple monthly retainer (or hourly, if you prefer something one-off).

In practice

In an initial, no-commitment conversation, I want to first listen to what you need and what you’re trying to achieve. Only after that do I send you a fixed quote, with everything included — no surprises and no pressure to decide on the spot.

If you want to start that conversation, get in touch.