# How much a website costs and why prices vary so much

> You ask for quotes for the same website and get prices from a few dozen to several thousand euros. Here is what you actually pay for and how to compare quotes.

Simplix · websites, online-stores, pricing

You ask five companies for quotes for the “same” website and get five prices: one of a few dozen euros, one of a few hundred, two in the thousands and one where you wonder whether an extra zero slipped in. They all promise a modern, fast website optimized for Google.

The difference usually isn’t anyone’s greed or generosity. It’s that each quote actually describes a different product. To compare them, you need to know what hides behind the word “website”.

## What you actually pay for

A website or an app isn’t just what you see on screen. The price adds up from several parts, and each quote includes more or fewer of them:

1. **Analysis.** The conversation about what you need, about your customers and what the website has to do for your business. The result is a clear list of pages and features.
2. **Design.** A purchased theme, adapted, or a design made specifically for you. Both can look good; they differ in how much your website resembles thousands of others.
3. **Features and integrations.** Forms, bookings, online payments, shipping, automatic invoicing, customer accounts, links to your management software. This is where the biggest price differences appear.
4. **Content.** Texts, photos and translations. Someone has to write, take or adapt them; if it isn’t in the quote, it means you are doing it.
5. **Technical quality.** Speed, technical SEO, accessibility, security, correct display on any phone. You don’t see them in the presentation, but you see them in Google and in the number of customers. A Deloitte study for Google found that, for online stores, a page just a tenth of a second faster increased conversions by 8.4%[^1].
6. **Testing and launch.** Checks on different phones and browsers, moving to the server, the security certificate, redirects from the old website.
7. **What comes after launch.** Hosting, the domain, updates, backups, the warranty and someone who answers the phone when something doesn’t work.

A quote of a few dozen euros and one of several thousand can have the same title, “business website”, but one may cover only items 2 and 6, and the other all of them.

## What makes the price go up

| Factor | Simpler (cheaper) | More complex (more expensive) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Number of pages | a few fixed pages | dozens of pages, categories, blog |
| Languages | one language | several languages, with translated URLs |
| Design | adapted theme | custom design, for your brand |
| Features | contact form | bookings, accounts, calculations, payments |
| Integrations | none | invoicing, shipping, ERP, CRM, APIs |
| Content | you provide it, ready-made | written texts, photos, translations |
| Administration | rare changes, through us | frequent changes, on your own, from a panel |

Not every website needs the right-hand column. A good business website for a local company can be simple and cheap. What matters is knowing what you get, so you don’t find out after launch that exactly what you needed is missing.

## The costs you don’t see in the quote

The initial price is only part of the cost. For a fair comparison, think about the first two or three years:

- **Licenses that renew.** Many themes and plugins are paid yearly. If the license expires, the plugin stays on the site but no longer gets updates[^2]. And updates matter: in 2025 alone, over 11,000 new vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem, 91% of them in plugins, and the most targeted ones were mass-exploited just hours after being disclosed[^3].
- **Platform subscriptions.** “Ready-made store” platforms have a monthly subscription and often a fee on every sale[^4]. For a store that sells well, the fee can over time exceed the cost of a custom solution.
- **Hosting and the domain.** Small, but yearly. Ask whose name they are registered in.
- **Later changes.** What does a new page or a new feature cost six months from now? Some low quotes make up for it with expensive changes.
- **Rebuilding.** A website that is slow, hard to find in Google or hacked a year after launch gets rebuilt from scratch. Then you pay twice.

> **A question that says a lot**
>
> Ask: “What happens if, a year from now, I want to work with someone else?” If the answer is unclear, or the code, domain and hosting stay with the provider, you already know how free you will be.

## How to compare quotes

Put the quotes side by side and look for the answers to the same questions:

- Which pages and features are included, specifically, not “a modern website”?
- Is the design custom or a theme? How many versions and how many rounds of changes?
- Who writes the texts and who takes the photos?
- Are speed, technical SEO and mobile display included? How are they measured?
- What is the delivery deadline, and what happens if it is missed?
- What warranty do you get, how long does it last and what does it cover?
- Whose name are the domain, hosting and code in?
- What do maintenance and later changes cost?

A good quote answers these questions before you ask them. One that doesn’t answer even after you ask tells you something else important about how the collaboration will go.

## How we set our prices

We don’t have one-size-fits-all packages. We first talk about what you need, then you get a detailed quote, with a fixed price and deadlines.

As a reference, a **business website** starts at **€500 + VAT**, and an **online store** at **€1,000 + VAT**. The final price depends on the number of pages and languages, the features and the integrations. Platforms, apps and large projects get a custom quote, after analysis.

All of them include, by default, the things you don’t see in the presentation: speed, technical SEO, optimization for AI assistants, security and a warranty of at least one year, two years or more for complex projects. They aren’t separate options.

We aren’t the cheapest. We try to offer the best value for money: a website that works properly from the start and stays that way for years.

[See our pricing](https://www.simplix.ro/en/pricing/)

[^1]: Deloitte and Google, [Milliseconds make millions](https://web.dev/case-studies/milliseconds-make-millions), 2020.
[^2]: For example, for WooCommerce extensions: [What are WooCommerce.com subscriptions?](https://woocommerce.com/document/managing-woocommerce-com-subscriptions/what-are-woocommerce-com-subscriptions/)
[^3]: Patchstack, [State of WordPress Security in 2026](https://patchstack.com/whitepaper/state-of-wordpress-security-in-2026/).
[^4]: For example, [Shopify pricing](https://www.shopify.com/pricing): a monthly subscription, plus an extra fee on every transaction when you don’t use their payment processor.