How much should a business website actually cost?

Ask five agencies to quote the same website and you will get five numbers that do not look like they describe the same project. That is not because four of them are lying. It is because "a website" describes a brochure with five pages and it also describes a platform with accounts, payments and an admin panel, and nobody agrees which one you meant.

Here is what actually moves the price, in roughly the order it matters.

1. How many genuinely different screens are there?

Not pages — screens. Twelve service pages that share one layout is one screen with twelve sets of copy. A homepage, a pricing table, a dashboard and a checkout is four screens, and it will cost more than the twelve.

When you are comparing quotes, count distinct layouts. It is the single best predictor of build time we have found.

2. Does content change without a developer?

A site where you edit text yourself needs a CMS, a content model, and an editing interface someone non-technical can survive. That is real work, and it is almost always worth paying for. The alternative is emailing your agency every time a price changes, which costs you more within a year.

3. Is anything transactional?

The jump from "shows information" to "takes money or holds accounts" is the biggest single step in cost, because it drags in things that are invisible on the surface:

• Authentication, password resets and session handling
• Payment gateway integration, refunds and failed-payment states
• Order or booking records that have to survive being wrong
• Emails that fire reliably at the right moment
• An admin view so somebody can fix things at 9pm

Every one of those has edge cases. Edge cases are where the hours go.

4. Who is producing the content?

This is the most commonly underestimated line item, and it is usually the reason a project slips. Design that arrives before copy gets rebuilt when the copy arrives. If you have not written the words yet, either budget for someone to write them or accept that the timeline starts when you do.

What a cheap quote usually means

A very low quote is not automatically bad. It usually means one of these, and it is fair to ask which:

• A template with your logo on it. Genuinely fine for some businesses. Not fine if you were promised custom design.
• Scope that ends at launch. No handover, no documentation, no support. You find out when you need a change.
• Performance and SEO treated as extras. They are not extras. They decide whether anyone sees the thing.
• The real number arrives later. Change requests are where a low quote becomes an average one.

The useful question is not "why is this expensive?" but "what is in this number that is not in the other one?" A good agency can answer that line by line.

How we quote

We scope before we price. That means a call, a written list of screens and behaviours, and a number attached to that list — not to a vague description of a website. If the scope changes later, you see the cost of the change before we build it, not after.

It is slower than firing back a number on the first email. It is also the only way we have found to make a fixed price mean anything.