A website is not a unit of measurement
When a client says they need a website, the studio hears a question with no units attached. It's like asking what a car costs: the answer depends entirely on whether you want a city hatchback or an executive saloon. Both are honestly called cars.
So before comparing prices, work out what was actually quoted. A one-page site with a contact form and a corporate site with an admin panel, a catalogue and a CRM connection are different products, even though both open in a browser.
What an estimate is actually made of
Every honest estimate has a handful of large blocks. Each one can be trimmed or dropped entirely — and that is exactly how suspiciously cheap offers get assembled.
- Planning: page structure, user flows, wireframes. The stage skipped most often, because people would rather go straight to making it look nice.
- Design: original layouts, or a template adapted to your brand. This is where the price spread is widest.
- Front-end and responsive work: how the site behaves on a phone, a tablet and a wide monitor.
- Back-end: admin panel, form handling, database, user accounts — everything you can't see but will use every day.
- Integrations: CRM, payments, delivery, analytics, email.
- Testing and launch: checking on real devices, load speed, moving to the live domain.
What cheap offers quietly leave out
A low price almost never means the studio works faster than everyone else. Usually it means part of the work simply isn't in the estimate.
The usual omissions are a template instead of design, no planning stage, and testing done on the developer's own laptop. All of it surfaces after launch: a button slides off the screen on mobile, the contact form lands in spam, and editing a paragraph of text costs extra.
A separate category is sites where you never receive the source code. Formally you have a website. In practice you're renting it from the studio, and you can't leave without starting over.
What moves the price most
Three things affect an estimate more than everything else combined. Understand them and you can sense the order of magnitude before you talk to anyone.
- The number of unique screens. Not pages — distinct templates. A catalogue, a product page and a cart are three screens; a thousand products inside that catalogue are still one.
- Integrations. Every connection to an outside service means working with someone else's documentation and someone else's bugs, which you can't fix from your side.
- Non-standard logic. A pricing calculator, a configurator, an account area with different user roles — that's building a service, not making a website.
How to compare proposals
Comparing bottom-line numbers is pointless. Compare the scope of work, and for that it's enough to ask every studio for an estimate in the same shape: a list of blocks and what each one includes.
If what comes back is a single line — “website development, $1,200” — that isn't an estimate, it's a number. You can't tell what you're getting, and you'll have nothing to point at if something turns out to be missing.
A good sign is a studio that asks clarifying questions before naming a price. A worrying one is a number quoted immediately, without asking about your goals, the scope, or what you already have.
When expensive is justified
A high price is justified when there's volume behind it: planning, original design, complex logic, integrations, real testing. It isn't justified when all that stands behind it is a studio's name and a handsome deck.
A practical rule: the more money the site is meant to bring in, the less sense it makes to save on the foundation. For a business-card site shown to a couple of partners, something inexpensive is fine. For an online store that will become your main sales channel, saving at the start almost always turns into a rebuild a year later — and the second time you pay full price.
We publish a starting price for every service on our pricing page and give an exact figure after a short brief. Not out of stubbornness: until the number of screens and integrations is clear, any figure named would be a fiction — either to you or to ourselves.
Compare the scope of work, not the bottom line. If a studio can't explain what makes up its price, you'll have nothing to hold them to later.
Frequently asked
Why can't you just name a price over the phone?
We can give you a range, and we publish one. But the exact figure depends on the number of unique screens, integrations and logic, and that becomes clear in one short conversation. A price named before the questions usually grows afterwards.
Can we build it cheaper now and extend it later?
Yes, if that's built into the architecture from the start, so the next stage continues the existing code. No, if cheaper means a template you'll later have to migrate away from. The difference is whether you discussed growth at the beginning.
What should an estimate contain so I can compare it with another one?
A list of work blocks, what each one includes, timelines per stage, and the terms for revisions after handover. Without that, you're comparing numbers rather than proposals.
Is a website builder always a bad idea?
No. For testing an idea or selling a single product it's a sensible quick start. Problems begin when people try to grow a business on one, with non-standard logic, serious SEO and rising traffic.