Why the same request produces wildly different numbers
Ask five suppliers for a website and the replies will not be close. People usually read that as the market being opaque or some of the quotes being chancers. Occasionally that is true. Far more often the request did not contain enough to price, so each supplier filled the gaps with a different set of assumptions, and what you are looking at is the size of the ambiguity rather than a disagreement about value.
The word website does not describe a fixed thing. It covers a five page brochure that could be built in a week and a custom platform with accounts, payments and an admin system behind it. Both are correctly called websites. Nothing in the request distinguishes them unless you distinguish them, so the first quote assumes the small end, the second assumes the large one, and both are quoting honestly.
A supplier facing an unclear job has two options. Quote low and hope, which ends in change requests and a relationship that sours around week four. Or price in the uncertainty, which is what most experienced ones do. Either way the ambiguity is on your bill. It is the one cost on this page you can remove for free.
What actually moves the number, and what does not
Buyers usually lead with page count, because it is the one dimension that is easy to count. It is close to the least important thing on the list. Ten pages sharing one layout are barely more work than five. One page that has to pull live availability from a booking system you already run is a different project.
| Driver | Why it matters more than it looks |
|---|---|
| Integrations with systems you already run | Someone else's software sets the rules. If it is undocumented or old, most of the risk in the project lives here. |
| Migrating existing content | Moving a large or messy site is often more work than building the new one. Old URLs have to keep working or you lose what they earned. |
| Bespoke design versus a system | A designed-once, reusable set of components is not the same job as every page being individually art directed. |
| Who writes the content | The most common cause of a stalled project. If the supplier writes it, that is real work. If you write it, that is a real deadline. |
| Accounts, payments and anything with a login | This is the line between a website and an application, and it is where testing effort multiplies. |
| How many people must approve | Not a technical cost and frequently the largest one. Every extra approver adds rounds. |
| Page count | Near the bottom, unless the pages genuinely differ. Templates are cheap; distinct layouts are not. |
If a supplier quotes without asking about the first two, be careful. Integrations and migration are where estimates go wrong, and a quote that has not examined them is a guess wearing a decimal point.
What you buy once, and what arrives every year
A build price is not the cost of owning a website, and comparing two build prices while ignoring what recurs is how people choose the more expensive option believing it is the cheaper one. Ask for the first year total rather than the launch figure.
- The domain, which renews annually and should be registered in your name rather than your supplier's.
- Hosting, which varies enormously with what the site actually does. A static marketing site and an application with a database are not comparable.
- Maintenance: dependency updates, security patches, backups, and the small changes nobody thinks to scope.
- Content work, if the site is meant to keep earning attention rather than sit still.
- Licences for anything the build depends on, which is worth asking about explicitly because it is the cost most often left out of a quote.
The question worth asking every supplier is what happens if you stop paying them. On a well built site the answer is that it keeps running and you can hire someone else. On some arrangements the answer is that it stops, and finding that out in year two is expensive. That is a structural question about ownership rather than a question about price, and it belongs in the same conversation.
The questions you will be asked, so you can answer them first
Every competent supplier asks a version of this before quoting. Having the answers ready is the difference between a firm number and a range, and working through them tends to surface the one or two things nobody had decided yet.
- What does the business do, and how does the money actually arrive?
- Who is the site for, and what did they come to do?
- What is wrong with the current situation, and what is that costing you?
- What would make this a success, in terms you could check a year later?
- What has to be included, and what would a reasonable person assume is included that is not?
- What systems does it have to work with, and who runs them?
- Is there existing content, and is it moving across as it is or being rewritten?
- What is fixed: a launch date, a brand rule, an integration, a regulator?
- Who has the authority to approve, and how many people need to see it first?
- What are you supplying, and by when?
Send the same answers to everyone you are asking. It is the only way the quotes are comparable, and once the ambiguity is gone the differences that remain are real differences in approach, which is the thing you actually wanted to compare.
What the cheap option tends to cost afterwards
Cheap is sometimes exactly right. A new business that needs a credible page and a contact form should not be commissioning a custom platform, and a supplier who tries to sell one is not serving them. The failure is not a low price. It is a low price attached to arrangements that are expensive to leave.
- Assets registered to the supplier rather than to you, so changing supplier needs their cooperation at the exact moment they have least reason to give it.
- No way for your team to edit anything, so every price change and every new page is a support request with a lead time.
- A build nobody else can pick up, either because nothing is written down or because it depends on tooling only its author understands.
- A page that looks finished and performs badly, which costs you continuously and quietly rather than visibly.
Each of those is checkable before you sign, and none of them costs anything to ask about. The price is worth much less as a signal than the answers to those four questions.
Why there is no number on this page
You reached a page about what a website costs and it contains no price. That is a deliberate choice and you are owed the reasoning rather than a form.
A published starting figure sets the frame for every conversation that follows it, including the ones where it does not apply. Read next to everything above, the reason should be visible: the same request genuinely can be two very different jobs, and a number attached to the small end quietly becomes the number attached to both. We would rather scope the work and quote the work.
That answer is only honest if the page is useful without it, which is why the drivers, the recurring costs and the ten questions are here in full rather than held back. Take them to whoever you are considering, including if that is not us. If a supplier will not walk through the list, you have learned something worth more than a figure.
The consistent version of this position is that we do not publish rates anywhere, including in the structured data behind these pages, and a test asserts it stays that way. A studio quoting its own rate on one page while calling the practice unhelpful on another would be worth ignoring.
What this does not cover
- This page contains no prices, ours or anybody else's, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. If you need a figure to plan against, this is not the page that gives you one.
- The ordering of the cost drivers is our judgement from quoting our own work. It is not a measured ranking, we have not run a study, and a supplier working on different kinds of projects would order them differently.
- It describes how a small studio scopes and quotes. Larger agencies, procurement-led buyers and fixed-price tenders work differently, and several of these points would not survive that process unchanged.
- It says nothing about what is reasonable in any particular market or currency. Rates differ enormously by country and by the kind of supplier, and we have not sourced any figure we would be willing to publish.
- Nothing here is contractual or legal advice. The point about assets being registered in your name is a practical one; whether your agreement actually secures that is a question for your agreement, and we are not lawyers.
Sources
- What Scene project brief and quoting structure. The drivers and the ten questions are the sections of the brief we actually issue before quoting an engagement, defined in lib/documents/defs/engagement.ts and published in full at /resources/how-to-write-a-website-brief. Run: documents/transactional/project-brief, version 2026.1.
- whatscene.in Search Console export, 28 days to 2026-08-23. Query-level impressions and average position for the cost phrasings this piece addresses, read from the committed export rather than from an analytics summary. Run: data/search-console/2026-08-25-performance-28d.zip.
Revisions
- 26 August 2026 First published, as the anchor above the pricing answer entries. Carries no figures, by decision.
This page is revised in place rather than replaced, so its address does not change.