Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five answers between €400 and €40,000. That is not because four of them are lying. It is because “a website” describes outcomes that have almost nothing in common.
Here is what actually drives the number, so you can read a quote properly instead of picking the middle one.
The honest ranges
| Roughly | What that buys |
|---|---|
| €0–500 | A template you assemble yourself on a site builder, plus your own time. Genuinely fine for validating an idea or a side project. You will outgrow it, and you cannot easily take it with you. |
| €500–2,000 | A freelancer configuring a bought theme. Reasonable value if the theme happens to suit you and you supply the text. The risk is what happens six months later when you need a change. |
| €2,000–8,000 | A designed site: layout made for your business, copy written, performance and search structure handled. This is where most small businesses with a real budget land. |
| €8,000–30,000 | Multiple page types, custom functionality, integrations with systems you already run, a content structure built to grow. |
| €30,000+ | Bespoke applications, e-commerce at volume, multi-language, teams of people. Different discipline entirely. |
Most of the disappointment in this market happens when somebody pays the third bracket and receives the second.
What actually moves the price
How many page types, not how many pages
Twenty pages that share one layout cost barely more than five. Five pages that each need their own design cost considerably more. When you get a quote, ask how many distinct templates are being designed. That number is the work.
Whether the words exist
This is the hidden cost in almost every project. If you supply finished copy, you save money. If you do not, either the agency writes it or the project stalls. Most stall. Ask explicitly who is writing the text, because “client to supply content” buried in a quote is how a six-week project becomes a nine-month one.
Custom functionality
Booking, payments, logins, calculators, anything connected to software you already use. Each one is a small project with its own edge cases and its own testing.
Who is doing it
An agency with account managers, project managers and designers has to cover those salaries. That is not a scam — on a large job that structure is what keeps it from falling apart. On a five-page site it is overhead you pay for and do not need.
Questions that separate expensive from overpriced
Ask any quote these, and compare the answers rather than the totals:
- “Who writes the content, and is it in this price?” The most common cause of a project doubling in time.
- “What load time are you committing to, and will you show me the measurement?” A quote that will not commit to performance is a quote for something slow.
- “Can I edit the pages myself afterwards, and what exactly can I change?” “Yes, through us” is a no.
- “Who owns the site and the accounts when we are finished?” If the answer is not “you”, you are renting.
- “What happens to my existing search rankings when we launch?” If they look blank, they have not planned redirects, and you will lose traffic you already paid for.
- “What is not included?” The most useful question on this list.
The cheapest site is rarely the cheapest
A €600 site that loses you two enquiries a month costs more within a year than a €4,000 site that converts, and you still have to replace it. The reverse is also true: a €15,000 site for a business that gets forty visitors a month is a beautiful thing nobody sees.
Work out what one new customer is worth to you. If the site only has to find one or two a year to pay for itself, you have your budget.
If it would need to find twenty, the site is not your bottleneck and you should spend the money on being found instead.
Why we do not publish a price list
We are asked this constantly, so: because any number we printed would be wrong for most of the people reading it. A five-page site for a business with finished copy and a four-page site needing research, writing and a booking system are not the same job at the same price, and pretending otherwise either overcharges the first or disappoints the second.
What we do instead is look first, for free, then quote a fixed price with a fixed scope and dates, in euro or US dollars, before anything starts. You can read what a build includes and decide whether it sounds like your kind of thing before you even talk to us.
Written by the people who would also do your work. If any of this applies to you, tell us what you are dealing with — the first look is free and you keep the findings.