What actually drives the price of a website

Two quotes land for what looks like the same website. One says €3,000, the other €9,000. Your first thought: one of them is gouging you, the other is desperate. Usually neither is true. The two numbers describe two different piles of work wearing the same word, “website”. A price is not pulled out of the air. It is the sum of a handful of concrete decisions, and most of those decisions belong to you, not to the studio.

Below is what genuinely moves an estimate. The point is not to rattle you with figures. It is to let you look at your own project and place it on the scale yourself, somewhere between a plain landing page and a sprawling site stitched together with integrations.

Scope: how many pages, and how much logic

Scope comes first, and it weighs the most. But you don’t measure it in pages. You measure it in distinct screens.

Ten product cards stamped from one template are, as work, barely more than a single page. A homepage, a service page, a case study and a blog are four separate layouts, each with its own structure and its own behaviour on a phone. So a 20-page site can land below a 6-page one when those 20 are clones and the 6 are all different beasts.

The real driver is the number of unique templates. Each new page type is a fresh design and a fresh build. Pages that repeat an existing structure cost almost nothing, because you’re just pouring content into a mould that already exists. The exceptions are the odd interactive pieces, a price calculator, a map you can pan around, a filter that reshuffles results. Those get counted on their own, because they’re logic, not layout.

Before you ask anyone for a number, count page types, not pages. That figure predicts the cost far better.

Still stuck between one page and a whole site? We pull the two apart in landing page vs multi-page site.

Content readiness: the most common hidden line item

Text and images have to exist. Nobody argues with that. The question is who produces them.

Hand over finished copy, photos that are actually usable, and a clear sense of what sits where, and you’re in the cheapest version of the project: the studio drops ready material into place. The other version is the expensive one. The copy is “coming next week”, the photos still need shooting or buying, and the structure has to be invented from scratch. Every one of those is hours, and someone pays for them.

How content lands on the bill, roughly:

• Ready material barely touches the price. You go live fastest this way.
• Copywriting is its own line. Writing it well means someone learns your product first.
• Photo and video mean a shoot, retouching, or licensed stock, whatever the budget allows.
• Translation gets its own section below. It’s far more than running text through a second column.

Here is the part people underestimate. Projects rarely slip because of code. They slip because the content trickles in over months while everyone waits. Sort it out before the build starts, not after.

Integrations: where the hours hide

A contact form and basic analytics are table stakes, usually already in the price. The trouble starts past that. Anything heavier is a wire running to some outside system, not a button you drop on a page. That wire has to be set up, tested, and made to fail gracefully when the system on the other end has a bad day.

Integration	Complexity	What it adds
Form to messenger or email	Basic	Usually already included
CRM (passing leads through)	Medium	Field mapping, testing
Online payment	High	Security, error flows, receipts
Booking or calendar	High	Slot logic, confirmations
Customer account	Very high	Logins, user data, sessions

Everything in that right-hand column is measured in hours. It’s also why a shop that takes card payments almost always costs more than a brochure site of the same page count. There is simply more machinery running under the floor.

Design, languages and build quality

These three are the hardest to read off an estimate, and they’re exactly where the gap between cheap and expensive opens up.

Design complexity

A tidy, familiar layout on a ready grid goes quickly. Bespoke graphics, animation that fires as you scroll, custom illustration, transitions nobody’s seen before: all slow. Decoration for its own sake rarely pays its way. A look that makes you instantly distinguishable from the three competitors a buyer is comparing you against usually does.

Number of languages

A second language means a whole second set of content. Then the technical tagging that tells search engines which version is which (hreflang), a switcher in the interface, and the small headache of German words running longer than the English and shoving your buttons out of line. Two languages cost meaningfully more than one. Decide on that before the build, not three weeks in.

Build quality

This is where two sites that look like twins quietly part ways. Something rushed together in a day and something built properly for your case are indistinguishable in a screenshot. Give it a year. One still loads fast, stays secure and takes edits without a fuss; the other starts cracking. Speed, clean code, security, how painlessly you can change things later: all of that is locked in while it’s being built. We go deeper in custom code vs a template.

How to self-estimate your project

Five questions, and you’ve got a rough bracket:

1. How many distinct page types, counting types and not the total number of pages?
2. Whose content is it: ready to go, or still to be made?
3. Which integrations have to work on launch day, and which can follow later?
4. How many languages, and are they all needed at launch?
5. What are you building for: a quick site to carry you through the year, or something meant to grow with the business?

The more answers that land on “yes, that part’s involved”, the higher you sit on the scale. As a reference point, a landing page with us starts from €649, and a corporate site is quoted per project, precisely because those five answers come out different every time. Support after launch runs from €60/h beyond whatever plan you’re on.

Want a real number instead of a range? Describe the project in a few sentences: the kind of site, a rough page count, where your content stands, and the integrations you’ll need. We’ll send back a quote split by stage, so you can see what each part of it is for.