How the price of a website is decided

The first question is almost always what a website costs, and the honest answer is that it cannot be answered before anyone knows what the site has to do. That is not a dodge. It is the same as asking what a vehicle costs.

What can be explained is how the price gets decided, and that is more useful than a number, because it gives you a way to compare one quote against another.

Page count is the wrong unit

A five-page site that is all text and images is a small job. A five-page site where one of those pages is a client area with logins, document uploads and card payments is a different project entirely. Same page count, enormous gap.

What moves the price is not how many screens there are, but what sits behind them:

• Logins and permissions: are there users, and if so, does everyone see the same thing.
• An admin area: who updates the content and the data, and how much work it is to build them a screen.
• Money: card payments, subscriptions, invoices. Each one adds an integration and the testing that goes with it.
• Data and files: how complex the database is, and whether files are uploaded and where they live.
• Sending: email, SMS or WhatsApp, and how much of it is automatic.
• Connections to outside services, and any work that runs on a schedule.
• How sensitive the data is. A system touching personal data needs work a brochure site does not.

What a quote should look like

A good quote separates things that behave differently, because otherwise it cannot be understood and cannot be compared with another one:

• The one-off cost to build.
• The monthly cost for support and maintenance, if there is one.
• Usage-based costs, which grow with activity.
• Third-party supplier costs, listed separately.
• And the method for pricing something that was not in the original scope.

That last line is the one that prevents the argument. Not every new request is a problem, but every new request needs to know in advance how it gets priced.

Why we do not publish a price list

Because a price list would give most enquirers the wrong number, in one direction or the other. Instead a discovery call establishes the scope, and after it there is a quote with the real numbers for your project.

If you have one of those calls coming up, we wrote about what to bring to it in preparing for a discovery call.

Talk about what your business needs, and get a real quote