What does a website cost? The honest facts about price and value.
How much does a website cost? This is generally the first question we get. A logical question, of course, but it’s like asking an architect how much a house costs. A house can be a wooden cabin or a villa with a pool. The price depends on your wishes, budget, and goals. The same goes for your website. We’ll explain what influences the price and why a €1,000 website is too cheap, but also why a €10,000 website is usually too expensive.
The pitfalls of a €1,000 website.
It stands to reason that a €1,000 website can’t amount to much. For that price, there simply isn’t enough time, expertise, or depth to invest in a project. Providers who offer websites for €1,000 are often students or companies with insufficient experience. They build sites with no room for growth or scalability, where functions are cobbled together with all sorts of free plugins. This is a disadvantage for any business with ambitions. In short, experience, proven expertise, custom work, and quality come at a higher price.
Customization and strategy.
A website starts with design, which is based on a well-thought-out strategy. What are your goals? Who is your target audience? What makes your business, service or product unique? A professional invests time in researching your business and competitors to build a website that truly works and converts. For development, a professional searches for the best tools and premium plugins and assembles a team of people with the precise expertise needed for your unique project. €1,000 doesn’t allow for customization, strategy, and a team. You get a website that might look nice, but that’s it.
When does it go too far?
A price that’s too low indicates insufficient quality, but a price that’s too high can be a sign of overkill. (This can be recognized by a 10-page quote.) Consider a booking system for a company that handles 20 bookings a year. It might involve unnecessary integrations with other software that adds little to no value to your business processes. Or it might be because you end up with a “unique, ground-up design” that costs thousands of euros in hours of reinventing the wheel, while a professional template could have provided the desired look and functionality for a fraction of the price.
Templates are bad, right?
The sales strategy of many high-end agencies is to reject templates to justify their own (overpriced) solutions. A template isn’t inherently bad. In fact, in many cases, it’s even the smartest and most efficient choice. Today’s premium templates are on a completely different level than those of 10 years ago. Premium template developers invest a significant amount of time and expertise in creating templates that adhere to the latest trends, techniques, and SEO guidelines, are feature-rich, and often of higher technical quality than a website built from scratch.
The added value lies in the execution, not the basis.
The true value of a website lies in its outline, origination, optimization, and oversight. Not in the template. Every WordPress website, including that “unique, ground-up design,” starts with a template and is then customized to the client’s needs. The added value lies in the execution; a good carpenter makes a better cabinet with the same tools than an amateur. A premium template saves you a lot of time, and therefore a lot of money. But the expensive agencies would rather not tell you that, as they want to bill as many hours as possible, while the cheap agencies just want to get you online in a week.
What else is being covered up?
The €10,000 price isn’t just based on the actual hours spent building your site, but mainly on overhead costs. Think of the salaries of unproductive employees like account managers, management, administration, and project managers who all perform crucial tasks and need to be paid, but don’t spend even one hour on your project. That fancy office? That has to be paid for too. Costs for unforeseen technical issues (because you absolutely wanted a ground-up design) are all included in that €10,000, but they don’t improve your website.
Are there any exceptions?
Sure! We sometimes build a website for €1,000 as well. This is for public figures and influencers whose websites don’t need to be found on Google because their traffic comes from social media. It also happens for long-term clients for whom we have already built several websites. And we have also built sites, okay, shops for €10,000 or even much more. For Nespresso, the Haas F1 team, and Xiaomi. Webshops with millions of visitors and millions in revenue that were so technically complex that an investment of €10,000 every few years (because even a €10,000 website has an expiration date) pales in comparison.
The perfect balance between price and quality.
Now that you understand the impact on price, we can answer the question based on our approach. We work with freelancers and don’t have any employees. This means you pay us for the actual hours of the people working on your project. Our prices are therefore always fair and transparent. Think of a starting price of around €2,500 for a custom website and €3,500 for an online store, plus a clear price per additional language, feature, page, or product. This is the investment needed for a website that is not only beautiful and unique, but also delivers real results.