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 updates2. 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 disclosed3.
  • Platform subscriptions. “Ready-made store” platforms have a monthly subscription and often a fee on every sale4. 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

  1. Deloitte and Google, Milliseconds make millions, 2020. ↩

  2. For example, for WooCommerce extensions: What are WooCommerce.com subscriptions? ↩

  3. Patchstack, State of WordPress Security in 2026. ↩

  4. For example, Shopify pricing: a monthly subscription, plus an extra fee on every transaction when you don’t use their payment processor. ↩

Cover image: Avij, Wikimedia Commons (public domain)