How Much Should a Website Cost? An Honest Breakdown

You ask three companies what a website costs. One says €800. One says €6,000. One says €25,000.

They are all quoting the same thing. Sort of.

Nobody in this industry likes explaining the gap, because explaining it means admitting that a large part of what you are paying for is not visible in the finished product. So here is the honest version, from a studio that does this for a living.

What the €800 website is

Somebody installs a template, changes the colours, drops in your logo and your text, and hands it over. Two to five days of work, most of it typing.

This is not a scam. For some businesses it is genuinely the right answer. If you need a presence — an address, a phone number, proof you exist — and your customers find you through word of mouth anyway, a template site does that job. Spending more would be spending more for no return.

What you are not getting: anything specific to your business. The layout was designed for a generic company, and your business is being reshaped to fit it. If your customers need to understand something unusual about what you do, a template will fight you the whole way. You are also getting whatever the template's speed and code quality happen to be, and you will not find out what that means until later.

What the €25,000 website is

Sometimes: a genuinely complex build. E-commerce with inventory logic, custom integrations, a product that has to work under load. That price can be entirely honest.

Sometimes: a brochure site with a project manager, an account manager, a strategist, a creative director, and a slide deck, layered on top of about three weeks of actual production. The agency is not lying. They really do have all those people, and those people really do attend meetings about your website. You are paying for the meetings.

The way to tell the difference is to ask what specifically is being built, and count how many of the answers are about the website versus about the process of making the website.

What sits in the middle, and why

Most real projects live between €3,000 and €10,000, and the range exists because of things nobody mentions in the sales call.

How much thinking happens before the design. A site built after somebody asked what your customers actually need takes longer and works better. A site built from a brief that says "modern, clean, like our competitor but better" is faster and cheaper, and it will look like everyone else.

Whether the code is written or assembled. A hand-built site loads fast because there is nothing in it that does not need to be there. An assembled site loads whatever the builder loads. This costs more up front and shows up as speed, search rankings, and the ability to change things later.

Whether you can edit it. An admin panel built for your content is real development work. A generic dashboard where you fight with a page builder every time you want to change a paragraph is cheaper and you will feel it every month for years.

What happens after launch. Some studios hand you a zip file and disappear. Some stay. That difference is priced in somewhere, and it is worth asking where.

The questions that reveal the real price

When you get a quote, ask these:

"What happens if I want to change this in a year?" — Watch for whether the answer is a process or a shrug. The shrug means you will be starting over.

"Who exactly is doing the work?" — In a big agency, the person selling to you is not the person building. That is not automatically bad, but it is worth knowing, because everything you explain gets explained again by someone else.

"What is not included?" — Hosting, domain, copywriting, photography, stock images, ongoing changes. Any of these can quietly add thirty percent after you have signed.

"Can I see something you built two years ago?" — Anyone can show you last month's work. Two-year-old work shows you whether their sites hold up, or whether they quietly rot.

"What is this built on?" — You do not need to understand the answer. You need to hear that there is one, and that they can tell you why.

How to figure out what you need

Be honest about which of these you are:

Your customers already know you. Referrals, word of mouth, existing relationships. The website confirms you are real. Template. Do not overspend on something that is not doing the selling.

Your website is where new customers find you. Search, ads, someone sees a link and decides whether to contact you. The website is the salesperson. Now the difference between a €1,000 site and a €6,000 site is not aesthetic — it is how many people get in touch, and it pays back or it does not.

Your website is the product. Booking, ordering, accounts, anything with logic behind it. Now you are commissioning software, and the number reflects that. Do not shop for this on price.

The mistake is not paying too much or too little in the abstract. It is paying template money when your business depends on the site, or paying agency money for something that is only there to confirm your phone number.

The uncomfortable truth about the cheap option

A €900 site that brings no enquiries costs €900 and produces nothing. A €5,000 site that brings two clients a year pays for itself and keeps going.

Neither of those outcomes is guaranteed by the price. Expensive websites fail constantly. But the cheap-site calculation is not "I saved €4,000" — it is "I spent €900 and found out nothing", and a year later you are having this conversation again with less patience and the same problem.

Work out what one new client is worth to you. If it is €300, be very careful about spending €6,000. If it is €5,000, a cheap website is the most expensive decision available to you.

We're DAKER, a web design and development studio in Baku working with startups and small businesses across Europe. We don't publish fixed prices, because a landing page and an online store are not the same conversation — but we'll tell you honestly which category you're in, for free, before you commit to anything. Get in touch.