What a business website should cost
Almost nothing about the price of a website is about design. It is about how many decisions someone has to make on your behalf, and how many of them you will change your mind about.
7 min read·Updated August 2026
Why the same brief gets quoted four different ways
Ask four studios for a website for the same business and the numbers will not be close. That is not because three of them are trying it on. It is because “a website for my salon” is not a specification, and each of them has quietly filled in the gaps differently.
One has assumed a template with your logo dropped in. One has assumed six pages of writing they will have to produce themselves. One has assumed a booking system connected to the software you already pay for. One has assumed photography. Those are four different jobs, and the only thing they have in common is the sentence that started them.
The single most useful thing you can do before collecting quotes is to write down what happens when the site works: someone books, someone orders, someone sends an enquiry with enough detail that you can reply properly. That sentence narrows the gap between quotes more than any amount of negotiating.
What actually drives the number
Page count matters far less than people expect. Ten pages of the same kind is barely more work than five. What costs money is the number of genuinely different things on the site: a booking flow is a different thing from a menu, which is a different thing from a case study, which is a different thing from a fee table.
Integrations are the other half. Connecting to a booking platform, a payment provider or a CRM is not hard in itself, but each one adds a system that can change under you and a set of edge cases someone has to think through. Two integrations is not twice one; it is closer to three times.
Content is where projects actually overrun. A site can be finished in three weeks and sit unlaunched for two months waiting on photographs and copy that nobody was assigned. If a quote does not say who is writing the words, that is the risk you are carrying.
Expensive and overpriced are not the same thing
An expensive website has a lot of work in it. An overpriced one has an agency in it — layers of account management, a design phase that produces slides rather than screens, and a discovery process whose output is a document telling you what you already told them.
The way to tell them apart is to ask what you get at each stage and what happens if you stop. A studio that can answer that quickly is quoting from a scope. One that cannot is quoting from a feeling.
Be equally careful at the bottom. A site at a few thousand rupees or a couple of hundred dollars is a template with your details typed in, and that is a legitimate product — it is just not a website designed around how your business sells. The problem is not the price, it is being sold the second thing at the first price.
Questions worth asking before you sign anything
Who writes the words, and what happens if they are late. Who owns the code and the domain at the end. What the site costs to run per year, separately from what it costs to build. What a change costs six months from now, when the person who built it has moved on to other work.
And the one most people forget: what happens if it does not work. Not a refund — nobody sensible offers that — but whether anyone is going to look at what the site is doing after launch and tell you honestly which parts are earning their place.