How much does a custom website cost? What drives the price

A five-page brochure site, a bookings site with payments and a customer portal, and a content site with hundreds of pages are all "custom websites". Their costs have little in common. Anyone who quotes a flat price before understanding scope is either guessing or building from a template and calling it custom. We scope per project and put the scope in writing before work starts.

• Strategy and discovery. Understanding your customers, offer and goals. Skipping it saves money and costs results.
• Design depth. Adapting a design system is cheaper than original brand-level design with custom illustration, motion and photography.
• Number and type of page templates. Ten pages on one template cost much less than ten pages on ten different layouts.
• Functionality. Forms, bookings, payments, accounts, search, filters, calculators, multilingual support. Each adds design, build and testing time.
• Integrations. CRM, email platform, analytics, payment processor, scheduling tool, inventory system. Integrations that need custom data mapping cost more than plug-ins.
• Content. Writing, photography and migration of existing content. This is the most underestimated item.
• SEO and tracking setup. Technical SEO, schema, redirects from the old site, analytics and conversion tracking.
• Performance and accessibility work. Building fast, accessible pages takes deliberate effort and testing.
• Who builds it. A freelancer, a small studio and a large agency price differently, and so do their processes and risk.

1. Deliverables: pages and templates, functionality and integrations, listed specifically.
2. What is not included, in writing.
3. Who writes the content, and who supplies images.
4. Number of design rounds and what happens beyond them.
5. Testing: browsers, devices, accessibility and performance targets.
6. Launch: redirects, tracking, SEO basics, training.
7. Ownership: you own the code, content and accounts at the end.
8. Timeline with milestones and what you need to provide, and when.
9. Post-launch support and maintenance terms.

• Hosting and domain renewals.
• Software licenses for themes, plugins, forms, scheduling or booking.
• Ongoing maintenance: updates, security, backups and monitoring. See website maintenance.
• Content updates after launch, and who does them.
• SEO and marketing to get traffic. A new website does not bring visitors on its own. See our local SEO checklist.
• Change requests when scope grows mid-project.

Option	Good for	Tradeoff
Website builder	Getting online quickly with simple needs	Limits on design, performance and integrations
Template-based site	Standard brochure sites on a modest budget	Looks like other sites; customization has limits
Custom build	Specific workflows, integrations, brand and performance needs	Higher upfront cost and a longer timeline

We wrote up the decision in detail in our Field Note on custom build versus template. The right answer depends on whether your website is a brochure or a working part of how you win customers.

• Put the quotes side by side and compare deliverables, not totals.
• Ask what happens if you need a change halfway through.
• Ask to see similar work and speak to a past client where possible.
• Check who actually does the work and whether it is outsourced.
• Be cautious of very low quotes that omit content, testing or launch work, and of very vague ones.
• Ask what the site costs to run and maintain in year two.

Send a short brief: what the business does, who the site is for, the three actions you want visitors to take, pages and features you expect, tools it must connect to, examples of sites you like, and the date you need it by. With that, a reputable team can give you a written scope and price. You can start at our quote page, or learn more about custom web development.