Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five ranges that do not overlap. That is not evasion — it is because "website" describes things that differ by a factor of fifty.
Here is what actually drives the number, with real ranges.
The four tiers
Tier 1: a single landing page — $250 to $800
One page, one goal, one form. Right for validating an offer, supporting a campaign, or a business whose selling happens on the phone. Usually two to three weeks.
Below about $250 you are buying a template fill, which is a legitimate choice but is not a design service.
Tier 2: a company website — $800 to $3,000
Five to fifteen pages, a content management system, basic SEO, contact forms and analytics. This is where most small and mid-size businesses correctly land. Three to six weeks.
Tier 3: a custom platform — $3,000 to $25,000
Anything with logged-in users, integrations with your other systems, or workflow inside the site. The cost is driven almost entirely by integration complexity, not by page count. Six to sixteen weeks.
Tier 4: enterprise — $25,000 and up
Multi-language, multi-region, compliance requirements, formal accessibility auditing, load testing. At this level the build is often the smaller half of the budget; coordination is the larger half.
What genuinely drives cost up
- Integrations. Connecting to a CRM, an ERP or a payment provider costs more than every page of content combined. Each integration is a small project.
- Content. If you need copy written, photos taken and translations produced, budget 20–40% on top. Most quotes assume you supply content, and most clients discover this in week four.
- Approval layers. A project signed off by one owner runs faster and cheaper than one signed off by a committee of six. This is not cynicism; it is scheduling.
- Languages. Each additional language adds roughly 15–25%, more if it is right-to-left, because layout and typography need genuine rework rather than a translated string file.
What does not drive cost as much as people expect
- Page count — once a design system exists, page eleven costs a fraction of page one.
- Visual polish — the difference between adequate and excellent design is mostly judgement, which is priced into the team rather than the hours.
- Hosting — for the overwhelming majority of business sites, $10–$40 a month is genuinely enough.
The ongoing costs nobody quotes
The build is a one-off. These are not:
- Hosting and domain — $120–$500 per year for a typical business site.
- Maintenance — updates, backups, security. $100–$300 per month, or your own time.
- Content — a site nobody updates loses search visibility within about eighteen months.
- The rebuild — realistically every four to six years. Amortise it; a $2,000 site is roughly $35 a month over its life.
How to get an accurate quote
Give the agency three things: the outcome you want, your deadline and your budget range. Withholding the budget feels like negotiating leverage and is not — it simply means the proposal is a guess. With a range, a good agency proposes the best version achievable within it, or tells you plainly that the range is unrealistic.
One question worth asking yourself first
What would a working website be worth to you? If ten extra enquiries a month is $30,000 in annual revenue, the difference between a $800 site and a $2,500 site stops being the interesting question. Most website budgets are set by comparison to other websites, when they should be set by comparison to the outcome.
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