What a website costs, and what that price is made of

"How much does a website cost" has no single answer, and that is not studios being evasive. A five-screen brochure site and a platform with user accounts share a name while differing twentyfold in work. So it is more useful to take apart the estimate than the price.

Design

You are not paying for pictures but for decisions. How many screens, how they behave on a phone, what happens on an error, what an empty list looks like. A designer who hands over only a beautiful homepage leaves half of those decisions to the developer — and they will still be made, just without you.

• Brand identity, if there is none: mark, palette, typography, tone
• Screens in all their states, not only the ideal one
• Mobile as its own work, not a squeezed desktop
• Handover: components, spacing, behaviour — what people build from

Build

Front-end and back-end work is the most predictable line of the estimate and the largest. Price depends on two things: how many unique screens, and how much logic lives in them. An About page and a filtered catalogue are different money even when the mockups look like neighbours.

Integrations are their own line. Payments, CRM, mail, analytics, maps. Each looks like an hour of work until the bank turns out to have its own confirmation format and the CRM its own idea of what an enquiry is.

Content

Copy, photography, translations. This is the block that breaks deadlines most often: the site is ready and there is nothing to put in it. If the client writes the copy, put it in the estimate as zero — but put it in. An invisible line becomes a month of waiting.

A site with no copy is not an almost-finished site. It is a mockup that opens in a browser.

Infrastructure and support

Domain, certificate, hosting, mail, backups, monitoring. Small money per month, but always there, and worth seeing before launch rather than a year later when the site stops opening because a certificate expired.

Support is not "we fix it if it breaks". It is the right to ask for a change and get it within a known time. A studio that does not sell support is selling you a goodbye on handover day.

Why two similar sites cost differently

• A different number of unique screens — similar is not the same
• Different integration depth: a form to email versus an enquiry in a CRM
• Different commitments on deadlines and support after handover
• Source code: handed to you, or kept by the contractor

Check that last one before signing. A site whose sources you were not given cannot be handed to another team, and the price of its support will be set not by the market but by the fact that you cannot leave.

What to ask before you agree

• What exactly each line includes, and what it does not
• Who writes the copy and who is responsible for photography
• What happens after handover: who owns the code and the accounts
• What a month of this site's life costs — domain, hosting, support

An honest estimate answers those four before you ask. If it fits on one line with a total, it is not an estimate — it is a hope.