Ask five agencies for a website and you will get quotes from $500 to $50,000. They are not quoting the same thing. They are filling the gaps in your brief with different assumptions.
The realistic bands
| Band | Typical range | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Template, self-assembled | $0–$500 | Builder subscription, your own time |
| Template, fitted by a freelancer | $800–$3,000 | Existing theme, your content, light customisation |
| Custom marketing site | $4,000–$15,000 | Designed to your brand, built from scratch, CMS |
| Custom with functionality | $15,000–$50,000+ | Portals, integrations, complex logic |
Most small businesses genuinely need band two or three. Band four is for software, not for a site that explains what you do.
What actually drives the number
Page count — less than you think
The tenth page of the same template costs a fraction of the first. Page count is a weak driver, which is why quoting per page is usually a proxy for something else.
Design origin — a lot
A theme adapted to your colours is a different job from a design produced for your brand. The second involves a designer, revisions and decisions. It is frequently the largest single line.
Content — the hidden one
Someone writes the copy and sources the images. If that is not you, it is billable, and if it is you, it is the thing that delays launch. More projects slip on content than on code.
Integrations — the multiplier
A contact form is trivial. A booking system synced to a calendar, a CRM push, a payment flow and a customer login are four separate pieces of work, each with its own failure modes.
Performance and accessibility
Meeting Core Web Vitals and basic accessibility standards is real work that does not show in a screenshot. It is also what separates a site that ranks from one that merely exists — see Core Web Vitals in plain language.
What comes after launch
- Hosting — $0–$50 a month for a marketing site.
- Domain — $10–$20 a year.
- Maintenance — updates, backups, monitoring. $50–$300 a month, or your own time.
- Content updates — either your CMS is genuinely usable by your team, or every change is billable.
Ask about that last point before signing. A site nobody internally can edit turns every typo into an invoice.
Getting comparable quotes
Write these down and give the same document to everyone:
- What the site must achieve — enquiries, bookings, sales, credibility.
- Rough page list.
- Who writes the copy and who supplies images.
- Integrations required, named specifically.
- Who updates it afterwards.
- Your deadline and your budget range.
Stating the budget is not weakness. It lets a good agency tell you what is achievable within it instead of guessing.
Questions worth asking
- Who owns the code and the domain when we finish? The answer should be you.
- What happens if we part ways? Can you take the site elsewhere?
- How many revision rounds are included?
- What is explicitly out of scope?
- Can you show a live site you built, not a mockup?
When cheap is right
If you need a credible presence quickly and your customers arrive by referral rather than search, a fitted template is a sensible decision, not a compromise. Spend the difference on the thing that actually brings customers.
Custom becomes worth it when the site itself is the acquisition channel, when your brand is a differentiator, or when you need functionality a template cannot carry.