How much a website costs in 2026

If you have gathered three quotes for a website, you have probably been given a range from €300 to €4,000. Not because someone is trying to fleece you — but because fifteen different products hide behind the same phrase.

Below is an honest breakdown: what you actually get in each price bracket, where the costs a quote never mentions are hiding, and when the cheapest option is a perfectly sensible decision.

Bracket 1: €0–500 — a template

For this money you get a bought template (WordPress or a page builder) into which someone drops your text and your logo. The site will work, it will have a contact form and it will look like ten thousand others.

When this is the right choice: a tradesperson who mainly needs contact details and opening hours; a new business still testing the idea; anyone who needs a site “this week”.

What the price usually excludes: the copy (you write it yourself), photography, translations, SEO setup, maintenance. Within a year the template gets dearer through the licences for the plugins it needs in order to run.

Bracket 2: €500–1,500 — a proper brochure site

The busiest bracket on the market. You get an adapted template or a simple custom layout, four to seven subpages, basic SEO setup, a build that works on phones and usually a content management system as well.

What to watch for: ask whether the price includes writing the copy. This is the most common hidden cost — and at the same time the element that most decides whether the site will sell. Ask, too, what happens after a year: who hosts the site, who updates it, what a change to the price list costs.

Bracket 3: €1,500–4,000 — a custom site

This is where copying templates ends. The site is designed for your brand, it has its own structure, real copy, edited photography and often animation tied to scrolling. It includes technical SEO, speed, accessibility and traffic measurement.

This bracket pays off when the website is the main sales channel: a restaurant, a hotel, a gym, an architecture studio, an estate agency, a manufacturer with a demanding product. In those trades the difference in conversion between an average site and a good one is bigger than the entire cost of building it.

Bracket 4: €4,000 and up — a web application

When the site is no longer a site but a tool: user logins, bookings, B2B ordering, a database connection, exports, reports. The price here does not depend on the number of subpages but on the number of processes that have to be covered.

Rule of thumb: if the words “login”, “order” or “stock” sit behind the site, you are no longer buying a website, you are buying software.

Six costs that quotes tend to leave out

1. Copy. Writing sales copy is work. If it is not in the quote, you will be writing it yourself — and that is most often exactly where a site stalls for months.
2. Photography. Shooting food, a space or products is a separate cost. Everyone recognises stock images, and they lower trust.
3. Plugin licences. With templates these add up to hundreds a year.
4. Hosting and the domain. Small, but permanent.
5. Translations. Every extra language is a fresh set of copy — and if the site is not technically ready for several languages, adding one later costs more than building it in from the start.
6. Maintenance. Updates, backups, small changes. Ask for the hourly rate that applies after handover.

Why the cheapest quote is often the dearest

Not because it is bad in itself, but because of what happens next. A cheap site as a rule has no sound technical basis for SEO, it is slow on a phone and it cannot sensibly be extended. In two years it has to be built again — and then you pay twice.

A simple test: ask the supplier what happens when you want to add another language or a booking system. If the answer is “then we build a new site”, you know what you are buying.

How to pick the right one of three quotes

• Ask for a list of subpages and for who writes the copy for them.
• Ask for a live example of one of their sites that is at least a year old — and check its speed on a phone.
• Check that the domain and the hosting are in your name. This is a common trap: if the domain sits with the agency, the agency has you by the throat.
• Ask what happens after launch and what an hour of work costs.

What we do

We work in the third and fourth brackets: custom sites with animation, and web applications. We do not use templates, because templates cannot be made fast, and because a client who needs a template should not be paying our rate for the work.

If you are not sure which bracket your project falls into, write us a few sentences about what the site has to achieve. We will tell you honestly when a cheaper solution somewhere else is the better one for you.