How Much Does a Website Cost?
“How much does a website cost?” — this is the first question in almost every inquiry, and honestly, it’s also the hardest one to answer. The same sentence can cover a three-page introductory site or a webshop with thousands of products connected to an ERP system. In this article we break down what actually drives the price, what price ranges you can expect, and where costs tend to slip.
Why isn’t there a single price?
A website’s price is made up of three things: how much unique thinking goes into it (strategy, UX, design), how much development (features, integrations, admin interface), and how much content (copy, photos, product data). If someone quotes a fixed price without asking about all three, they’re either putting you on a template or they’ll charge extra later.
It helps to think of it like renting an office: the price per square meter tells you nothing on its own until you know how many square meters you need and in what condition.
Typical price categories
1. Template-based introductory site
A ready-made WordPress or website-builder template, customized with your colors and your text. It’s quick to launch and has a low entry cost. In exchange, it will look like many others, and expanding it usually turns into stacking plugins.
Who it’s good for: a starting business that, for now, just needs a credible online business card.
2. Custom-branded company website
Your own design, a structure tailored to your processes, and a content management system you can actually edit yourself. This tier includes UX planning, SEO foundations, and measurement — you’ll know where your inquiries are coming from.
Who it’s good for: anyone for whom the website is a sales tool, not decoration.
3. Webshop
The number of products drives up the price far less than variants, pricing logic, and integrations do. A shop with 40 products and a complex size-color-discount matrix plus inventory sync can cost more than a simple catalog of 800 products.
4. Custom system / portal
Customer portals, booking systems, internal admin tools. Here we’re talking about software development: permissions, data model, testing, operations. The price scales accordingly, but this is the category where ROI is easiest to quantify — because it replaces hours of manual work.
What drives up the price that you don’t expect?
- Content. The most common source of delay isn’t development — it’s that the copy and photos don’t get finished for three months. That’s money too: a rescheduled timeline is always more expensive.
- Integrations. Invoicing software, CRM, inventory management, shipping providers. Each one is a separate API, separate error handling, separate testing.
- Languages. Multilingual support isn’t “we’ll translate it” — it’s a separate content structure, URL scheme, and SEO work.
- Migration. Moving from an old site while preserving your search rankings is a task of its own: redirects, URL mapping, indexing checks.
- Legal compliance. Privacy notices, cookie handling, accessibility. Adding these afterward is always more expensive.
The hidden line item: operations
The cost doesn’t end at launch. Hosting or servers, domain, SSL, backups, updates, security patches, monitoring. This shows up monthly or yearly, and if it isn’t budgeted for, it usually surfaces only once something has already gone wrong.
Restoring a neglected website almost always costs more than the maintenance would have.
How to request comparable quotes?
If you ask for three quotes and each one covers something different, you’re not comparing prices — you’re comparing misunderstandings. It’s worth including these six points in every request for quote:
- Goal. What should a visitor do on the site? Request a quote, buy, book an appointment?
- Page list. Roughly how many subpages, and which ones.
- Features. Forms, search, filters, booking, payment, login.
- Integrations. Which systems it needs to talk to, by name.
- Content. Who writes the copy, is there photography, is translation needed.
- Operations. Who’s responsible for how it runs after launch, and with what response time.
Once you have these six points, quotes suddenly become comparable — and you’ll notice that the cheapest quote is usually cheaper because it includes less.
The right question isn’t the price, it’s the return
A website is a good investment if you can calculate what it brings in. Two numbers are worth clarifying up front: what one inquiry is worth to your business, and how many inquiries you expect per month. If an inquiry is worth on average 200,000 HUF in revenue, and the site brings in three a month, the investment pays for itself within a few months. If you can’t estimate this, the problem isn’t the quote — it’s the goals.
With us, every quote starts with a short conversation where we go through these six points together — after that, you get an itemized, comparable quote with no surprises. Get in touch, and let’s figure out together what you actually need.
