Hiring
How much does a website cost, and what drives the number?
Website cost is driven by scope rather than page count: whether content exists, whether payments are involved, how many integrations are needed, and who carries the design work. Two quotes that differ by a factor of three are usually quoting two different projects rather than the same one at different rates.
Why do quotes vary so much for the same brief?
Because the brief is almost never as specific as it feels. "A five-page site for my business" can mean copy supplied or copy written, stock photography or a shoot, a template adapted or a design produced, hosting included or excluded, and support for thirty days or twelve months.
Each of those doubles or halves the number. The variance between quotes is a measure of how much interpretation the brief left open, not of how honest the suppliers are.
What actually drives the price?
| Factor | Effect on cost | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Content readiness | Large | Writing several thousand words is days of work, not an afternoon |
| Payments | Large | Tax, shipping, discounts, refunds and failure states are all real logic |
| Integrations | Large | Each external system has its own quirks and its own failure modes |
| Custom design | Medium | Design is a separate discipline frequently assumed to be included |
| Page count | Small | The tenth page of the same template costs very little |
| Accessibility done properly | Small at build | Cheap as a build decision, expensive as a remediation project |
What is usually left out of a quote?
- Copywriting — the single most common exclusion and the most common cause of overrun
- Photography, which stock imagery replaces at a measurable cost in trust
- Hosting beyond the first year, often at a rate above market once you are settled
- Revisions beyond a fixed number of rounds
- Support beyond thirty days
- Legal pages tailored to what the site actually collects
- Migration of existing content from an old site
What does it cost to keep a website running?
- Domain
- Annual, typically small, and non-negotiable. Auto-renew it.
- Hosting
- Monthly or annual. Static sites can be free to host; database-driven sites are not.
- Certificate
- Free through Let’s Encrypt on any serious host. Paying for one is rarely necessary.
- Maintenance
- Updates, backups, monitoring, small changes. Priced monthly or hourly.
- Content
- The ongoing cost most budgets omit entirely, and the one that decides whether the site grows.
On this site, maintenance retainers start from $50 a month and SEO retainers from $80 a month. Those numbers are published rather than quoted on request, because a service page with no price loses buyers who assume they cannot afford it.
Is fixed price or hourly better?
Fixed price puts the estimating risk on the person best placed to manage it, which is the supplier. Hourly puts it on the client, who cannot see the work being done. For a defined project, fixed price is almost always the better arrangement for the buyer.
The catch is that fixed price only works when the scope is written down. A fixed quote against a vague brief becomes a change-request argument, which is worse than an honest hourly arrangement. The two documents — fixed price and written scope — belong together.
How do I compare quotes fairly?
- List what each quote excludes, explicitly and by omission.
- Price the missing items at market rates and add them to each total.
- Add twelve months of hosting, support and domain to each.
- Check the ownership terms — a cheaper site you do not own is not cheaper.
- Compare the normalised totals, then compare the measured quality of each supplier’s delivered work.
What does cheap actually cost?
The failure pattern is consistent: a low quote, a site that loads slowly and renders its content in JavaScript, no accessibility consideration, hosting and domain in the supplier’s account, and no written ownership transfer. Two years later the business wants to move and discovers it cannot.
The rebuild then costs more than the difference between the original quotes, and it happens at a moment chosen by circumstance rather than by the business. That is the real price, and it does not appear on any invoice.
Questions people ask about this
- Why do you publish prices when most developers do not?
- Because it filters. Enquiries arrive from people who have already accepted the level, which raises close rate and removes the conversation nobody enjoys. The buyers lost to a published price were not going to buy at that price anyway — they were going to spend both parties’ time discovering that.
- Is a cheap website ever the right choice?
- Yes — when the site genuinely is a business card, there is no commercial function, and the alternative is no site at all. The mistake is buying a cheap site for a job that needs a real one: a store taking payments, or a site that has to rank against competitors who invested.
- How much should I budget for content?
- More than you expect. Several thousand words of accurate, specific copy is days of work whoever does it. Budgeting zero for content is the single most common reason projects run late, because the build finishes and then waits weeks for text.
- Do I need to pay for SEO separately?
- Technical SEO baseline — schema, sitemap, meta, performance, crawlability — should be part of any competent build rather than an upsell. Ongoing SEO is separate work: content, internal linking, monitoring and iteration over months. A build that ships without the baseline is incomplete; a build that promises rankings is overselling.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. The examples in these guides come from those builds and from the audit that rebuilt this site, not from a content brief. More about how I work, or read the case studies.