How much does a website cost? Your options and what to keep in mind

What a website costs comes down to three choices: how it's built, what it needs to do, and how you manage it afterward. In this article, you'll see roughly what template, semi-custom, and custom websites cost, where your money goes, and how to make a choice that still holds up three years from now.

A marketing manager has three website proposals on her desk. The cheapest is a fraction of the most expensive, and leadership wants to know by Friday why the gap is so big. The proposals themselves don't give her that answer, because each agency prices different components based on different assumptions.

Why do website prices vary so much?

Search for “website development cost” and you'll find figures anywhere from €1,000 to €100,000. If you need to justify a budget, a range that wide doesn't help much. The gap mostly comes down to approach, ambition, and how much the website needs to grow with you.

Many organizations start with a cheap template and only later discover the site is too limited. Others invest heavily and still end up with a website that doesn't fit their brand or internal processes. Either way, they end up paying twice.

How much does a website cost? The three most common options

Broadly speaking, you can choose from three types of websites. The amounts below are estimates for a professional business website.

Template: approx. €5,000 to €15,000

You pick an existing design, add your content, and go live quickly. That works well for small organizations or temporary projects. You do get little room to customize, it's harder to stand out, and building on it later is often difficult.

Semi-custom: approx. €15,000 to €30,000

You get more freedom in design and technology. This suits organizations that want to grow without complex requirements. As soon as you want to connect other systems, go multilingual, or carry your brand through more consistently, you'll often run into limits.

Custom: approx. €30,000 to €60,000 and up

Your website is built around your processes, brand, and goals. It scales and lasts for years, because you can keep building on it. This is the logical choice when your website plays a central role in marketing, sales, or customer engagement.

Where does your money go when you build a new website?

A proposal often shows a single total, which makes it hard to compare and hard to explain why one agency costs more than another. That's why you should always ask for a breakdown. These are the biggest cost drivers:

• Strategy and structure: the blueprint of your website. What does the site need to do, for whom, and how does it support your goals?
• UX and visual design: a design that showcases your brand and guides visitors toward action. UX stands for user experience.
• Front end and CMS: the technology behind the scenes and the CMS, the content management system you use to update the site yourself.
• Integrations and data: connections to your CRM, ERP, marketing tools, and other systems. A CRM manages your customer data, while an ERP runs your business processes and administration.
• Content migration: moving, improving, or rewriting existing content.
• Maintenance and ongoing development: hosting, security, updates, and continuing to build on what you have.

Which factors affect the price most?

• Integrations with other systems, such as your CRM or marketing automation.
• Multilingual support or running several websites from one environment (multisite).
• A custom CMS that fits the way your team works.
• Scalability: how much growth the website needs to handle.

Why a cheap website can end up expensive

A website that hits its limits within a year costs you time every month. Your team works around the CMS, campaign pages wait on a developer, and marketing goals slip. None of those costs show up in a proposal.

We see this regularly with organizations that come to us for their next website: the previous one, built quickly and on a tight budget, turns out to be so locked down after a few years that adding a language or connecting the CRM, which sounds like a small request on paper, means rebuilding from scratch.

That's why it pays to look at the total cost over three to five years for every proposal. Alongside the build, factor in maintenance, ongoing development, and your own team's hours. That way, you compare options on what they actually cost you.

How True People arrives at a realistic price

A budget that overruns later is hard for any marketer or manager to explain to leadership. That's why we start with your goals, processes, and systems before we name a number. Once we know what the website needs to do, we put together an estimate.

• Custom work that fits: tailored to your goals and the way your team works.
• Choices that last: as an Umbraco Gold Partner, we build on a platform you can keep developing for years.
• Transparency from proposal to launch: you see where your budget goes, component by component.

After launch, we keep working with you through Discover, Build, and Grow, so your website grows along with your organization.