Send the same brief to ten studios and the quotes will span an order of magnitude. That is not a sign that nine of them are lying. It usually means ten people read the same paragraph and pictured ten different projects.
This is a guide to reading those numbers. It will not tell you what your site costs, because nobody can do that from a paragraph. It should tell you whether a quote in front of you is serious.
The three questions that set the price
Almost every quote resolves to three things. Everything else is detail.
- 01How many unique page designs are there? Not pages. Designs. A 40-page site built from six templates is cheaper than an 8-page site where every page is different.
- 02Does anything have to be built that does not already exist? A contact form exists. A quote calculator that prices 200 material combinations does not.
- 03Who is producing the content? Copy, photography and product data are the most commonly underestimated line in the entire project, and the most common reason a build sits idle.
If a quote arrives without those three being discussed, it is a guess. It may still be a good guess, but you should know that is what you are holding.
What the money actually buys
| Budget | What is realistic | What is not |
|---|---|---|
| Under $500 | A template, configured. Your logo, your colours, your copy poured into someone else's structure. | Anything specific to your business. At this price nobody has time to understand it. |
| $1,000 – $3,000 | A small custom site. Real design decisions, a CMS you can edit, proper performance and accessibility. | Complex functionality, integrations, or a large content migration. |
| $3,000 – $10,000 | A full site or a small store. Custom design system, integrations, migration with redirects, testing. | Bespoke software. This buys a very good website, not an application. |
| $10,000 – $50,000 | Applications. Portals, configurators, multi-region stores, anything with logins and business rules. | Certainty on day one. Projects this size discover things, and the good ones budget for that. |
Why the cheap quote is expensive
The failure mode of a cheap build is rarely that it looks bad. It is that it cannot be changed.
A site assembled from a page builder and fourteen plugins works on the day it launches. Six months later you want a field added to a product, and the answer is that it would mean rebuilding the template, because the structure was never designed, only arranged. The second build costs more than the first would have, and you have paid twice.
The reverse failure is real too. Paying agency rates for a five-page brochure site that your marketing team edits weekly is buying engineering you will never use.
Questions that separate a real quote from a hopeful one
- What happens if the scope changes halfway? A real answer describes a process. A vague one means you will argue about it later.
- Who owns the code, and where does it live? It should be your repository, under your account, from the first commit.
- What is explicitly not included? A studio that has done this before has a list ready.
- What do you need from me, and by when? If nobody asks this, the schedule is fiction.
- What is the hosting and maintenance cost after launch? A build price with no running cost attached is incomplete.
A note on hourly rates
Comparing hourly rates across studios tells you almost nothing. A developer at $30/hour who takes 200 hours costs more than one at $90/hour who takes 60, and you will wait three times as long. The number that matters is the total, against a scope you both wrote down.
The short version
Decide what the site has to achieve before you ask what it costs. Get the scope in writing. Then compare quotes on what is included rather than on the number at the bottom, and be suspicious of any figure that arrives without questions attached.
Working on something like this?
We build websites, stores and custom applications, and we will tell you honestly if the thing you are describing does not need one.