What a website costs in 2026: the numbers we actually work with

“How much does a website cost?” is the first question in almost every conversation. The honest answer, “it depends”, sounds like an excuse, so let me break it into concrete parts, using the numbers we actually work with when we put a quote together.

One note up front: the ranges below come from our own projects, delivered in Romania. Other agencies have a different cost structure and may justifiably be more or less expensive.

Why there is no single price

A website isn't an off-the-shelf product. Four things move the budget most:

• How many different screens need designing. Not the number of pages. A blog with 40 articles uses one template, so it costs like one. Three pages with completely different layouts cost like three.
• Where the content comes from. If the text and photos come from the client, they don't appear in the quote. If we produce them, it's usually the second-largest line after implementation. And honestly, this is where most projects stall — not on design.
• What the site has to do. A contact form is one thing; online bookings, payments or customer accounts are another.
• Integrations. ERP, couriers, invoicing, CRM. Here you depend on someone else's documentation, and estimates are at their most fragile. We've been burned a few times by APIs that looked simple on paper.

If someone gives you a price before discussing these, you don't have an estimate, you have a number.

The ranges our projects fall into

Landing page, single offer — €500-1,500. For ad campaigns. Conversion-focused structure, design, form, measurement. Usually 1-2 weeks. If you sell one service, this is often the first investment that makes sense.

Business website, 5-10 screens — €1,200-3,500. The most requested format: home, services, about, portfolio, blog, contact. Custom design, mobile version, the technical side of SEO, an admin panel.

Larger multi-service website — €3,500-7,000. Separate pages per service and per city, blog, price calculators, multilingual, a CRM connection.

Online store — €3,000-12,000. The range is wide because of the catalogue and the integrations. Fifty products with no stock sync is a different project from 5,000 products with an ERP and three couriers.

Web app with accounts — from €8,000. Estimated on features, not pages, and almost never after a single conversation.

Our timelines run from one to six weeks depending on complexity. What stretches them most often isn't the technical work, it's waiting for text and photos.

As for the very cheap offers: I'm not saying they're a scam. You get a filled-in template. For someone who only wants a minimal presence that can be fine, as long as they know that's what they're buying.

The costs that don't show up in the quote

This is what upsets people later, not the initial price.

• Domain: roughly €10-25 a year.
• Hosting: €50-300 a year for a business website. Stores with real traffic go past that easily.
• SSL: usually included. If it's billed separately at a few hundred, ask why.
• Maintenance: we charge €50/month for a business website. I won't pretend it's legally mandatory, but a site left without updates for a year and a half generally turns into a security problem.
• Content changes: either you do them yourself in the admin panel, or you pay by the hour. That's why we insist on a panel the client can actually use without calling us.

As a rough order of magnitude, set aside 15-20% of the initial cost per year. That's not a scientific formula, it's what we've seen work out in practice.

What makes me look twice at a quote

Not the low price itself, but what's missing around it:

• Nothing was asked about the business before the number appeared. A halfway serious estimate needs a conversation of about half an hour.
• It doesn't say what's not included. Good quotes have that section: content, photos, translations, integrations.
• No stages, no deliverables. “Done in two weeks” with nothing in between usually lands at two months.
• It doesn't say who ends up owning the domain, hosting and code. If they stay with the agency, you've rented a website, not bought one.
• Nothing is said about speed, mobile or indexing.
• There's no hand-over step where you test and accept. A link sent over WhatsApp isn't a hand-over.

How we build a quote

1. A conversation of about 30 minutes: what you sell, to whom, what you want to happen on the site, what you already have.
2. An estimate as a range, not a fixed figure. Something like “€2,400-3,200, depending on how many service pages come out of the structure”. A range we can defend is more useful than a fixed price renegotiated halfway through.
3. A quote split into stages: structure and copy, design, implementation, technical SEO and measurement, testing and launch. Each with a deadline and a deliverable.
4. Payment in instalments tied to stages — usually 40% up front, 30% when the design is approved, 30% at launch. The client doesn't pay everything in advance, and we don't work two months on trust.

The contract always states that the domain, hosting, code and accounts belong to the client.

How much is worth investing

The useful question isn't which website is cheapest, it's what a client is worth to you.

An example calculation: if a new client brings you €800 on average, and the site costs €2,500 plus €600 a year in maintenance, you need about four clients in the first year to cover it. Those numbers are made up as an illustration — put your own in.

If four clients a year from online sounds like a lot, maybe you don't need a €6,000 project yet, but a properly set up Google Business profile and a decent services page. And if a client is worth €5,000 to you, saving a thousand on a site that brings noticeably fewer enquiries is a poor trade.

In short

A fair price comes out of a conversation about the business, not from a package table. Always ask five things: what's included, what isn't, how long, in which stages, and who owns what at the end. The rest is negotiation.

If you'd like an estimate for your case, get in touch — we'll send a range we can justify and the quote broken down by stage, no strings attached.