Ask ten studios what a website costs and you’ll get ten versions of “it depends.” That’s technically true and completely useless. So here’s the honest version: a website is a range, and the range is wide because “a website” can mean a one-page brochure or a custom platform that runs a business.
The number comes down to a handful of decisions. Once you understand them, you can predict your own cost surprisingly well. This is that breakdown - no sales pitch, just the numbers and what moves them.
What actually drives the price
Four things decide most of the cost:
- Scope - how many pages, and how different each one is. Five near-identical pages are cheap; five bespoke layouts are not.
- Custom design vs. a system - a unique, made-for-you design costs more than adapting a proven layout. Both can be excellent; they’re just priced differently.
- Functionality - a contact form is nothing. A store, a booking system, user accounts, payments, or a custom dashboard is where the hours pile up.
- Content - words and images. Bring finished copy and photos and you save. Need us to write and source them, and that’s real work on top.
Everything else - integrations, extra languages, a CMS so you can edit it yourself - stacks on top of those four.
Real ballpark ranges
Prices below are in euros, the way we actually quote. Treat them as ballparks, not binding quotes - your project will land somewhere inside, or just outside, its band.
One-page / landing site - €600 to €1,500. A single, well-built page: clear story, fast, mobile-perfect, one call to action. Great for a launch, an event, or a focused campaign.
Multi-page business website - €1,600 to €5,000. The most common project. Home, services, about, contact, maybe a blog. Add custom branding, copywriting, or a CMS and you climb the band. A small one starts around €1,600 to €2,200, which is a fair place to begin.
Content / blog-driven site - €1,500 to €4,500. Built to publish often and rank: clean article templates, categories, solid SEO structure, fast images.
E-commerce / online store - €3,000 to €8,000+. Products, cart, checkout, payments, shipping, taxes. The ”+” is real - more products, custom flows, and integrations push it higher.
Custom web app - €5,000 to €15,000+. Accounts, dashboards, logic, a database doing real work. This isn’t a website with a login bolted on; it’s software, and it’s priced like software.
Cross-platform mobile app - from around €8,000. One codebase, both iOS and Android. Cost scales with the number of screens, the integrations, and whether it needs a backend built alongside it.
DIY, template, freelancer, or studio
The same website carries four very different price tags - and four very different total costs:
- DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) - €0 to a few hundred per year. Fastest and cheapest up front. You trade your own time, hit a ceiling on customization, and pay rent forever.
- Premium template - €50 to €200 for the file. Looks great in the demo. The cost shows up later, in the hours spent bending it to your real content and the performance baggage it drags along. We wrote a whole piece on that: The Hidden Cost of Page Builders.
- Freelancer - €500 to €5,000. Huge quality range. The right one is fantastic value; the risk is availability and what happens after launch.
- Studio - the ranges above. You’re paying for strategy, a tested process, performance and accessibility built in from the start, and someone who’s still around in a year.
None of these is “the answer.” A neighborhood cafe doesn’t need a studio build; a company whose website is its main sales channel shouldn’t run it on a €60 template.
The costs nobody mentions
The build is a one-time number. These are ongoing, and they’re easy to forget when you’re comparing quotes:
- Domain - roughly €10 to €20 a year.
- Hosting - from a few euros a month for a static site to more for an app. A fast, static site is cheap to host on purpose.
- Maintenance - updates, fixes, small changes, security. Budget for it whether you handle it yourself or hand it off.
- The cheap-now tax - the biggest hidden cost of all. A bargain build that’s slow, hard to edit, or impossible to extend gets rebuilt in eighteen months. You pay twice.
What you’re actually paying for
When a build costs more, the money usually goes somewhere you can’t see in the demo:
- A site that loads in under a second and stays fast as it grows.
- Accessibility, so everyone can actually use it.
- SEO structure baked in, not bolted on afterward.
- Code you own outright, with no platform holding your content hostage.
- A real person to call when something breaks.
Cheap sites skip these. The gaps don’t show up on day one - they show up later, usually all at once.
How to get a real number for your project
The ranges above will put you in the right ballpark. To turn a band into a figure, you only need to answer the four questions from the top: how many pages, how custom, what it has to do, and who’s writing the content.
We built a 60-second estimate tool that does exactly that - pick a type, a size, and a few add-ons, and it gives you a live range. It’s a ballpark, not a binding quote, but it’s an honest one. When you’re ready for a real figure, tell us about the project and we’ll get specific.
No surprises, no padded invoice. Just what it costs, and why.