Ask three people what a website costs and you’ll get three answers that differ by a factor of a hundred. A cousin says “just use Wix, it’s free”. A freelancer quotes €1,200. An agency sends a proposal for €18,000 and a twelve-week timeline. All three are, in their own way, telling the truth — which is exactly why the question feels impossible to budget for.
This article puts the numbers side by side, explains what moves the price up or down, and then does something most agencies won’t: it shows you our own prices and what each one includes, line by line.
The three price bands
Most guides to website pricing, whether written in London, Paris or Berlin, land on the same three bands. A UK cost guide from Expertsure puts DIY builders at £0–29 a month, freelancers at £500–10,000 per project and agencies at £3,000–30,000+. French guides such as ConvertiLab and Synqro quote almost identical shapes in euros: a builder at €15–50 a month, a freelance showcase site from roughly €500 to €3,000, an agency from €3,000 up to €20,000.
1. Do-it-yourself builders — €15 to €50 a month. Wix, Squarespace and their cousins. The software is cheap; your time is the real cost. You pick a template, write the words, wrestle with the image sizes, and repeat the wrestling every time something changes. The monthly fee never stops, so over five years a “€20 a month” site has cost you €1,200 and you still don’t own the code. Builders are also, almost without exception, heavy: a template designed to do everything ships the code for everything, and your visitors download it whether they need it or not.
2. A freelancer or small studio — roughly €500 to €5,000, paid once. This is where most small businesses belong. Someone with a name and a reputation builds the site for you, you pay a fixed amount, and you own the result. The range is wide because “a website” is not one thing: a single page with a contact form and a six-page site with a blog and a booking flow are very different amounts of work.
3. An agency — €3,000 to €20,000 and beyond. Account managers, designers, developers, a project plan with phases. Worth every cent if you have a 200-product shop, custom integrations or a brand refresh across print and digital. For a bakery, a solicitor or an electrician, it is usually paying for a team you don’t need.
What actually moves the price
Whoever builds it, the same five things push the number up or down.
- Number of pages. Every page is content to write, design to fit, and links to keep straight. One page and ten pages are different projects.
- Features. A contact form is easy. Online booking, payments, a members’ area or a multilingual site each add days.
- Content. If you hand over finished text and good photos, the builder builds. If they have to write, source photos and structure your offer, that’s a second job on top of the first — and it’s often the part that decides whether the site sells.
- Design. A template tweaked in an afternoon versus a design drawn for you from a blank page.
- What happens after launch. Hosting, updates, backups, small changes. Some quotes include a year of it; some leave you on your own the day the site goes live.
A quote that looks cheap often hides the last three. A quote that looks expensive often includes them. Always ask what’s in the number.
The hidden monthly costs
The build price is not the whole bill. Three recurring items live on almost every website:
- Domain name — usually €10–20 a year. You should own this yourself, in your own account, whoever builds the site.
- Hosting — from free to €30+ a month. A well-built static site (more on that below) can sit on a free or near-free plan and still be faster than a €30 one, because there is nothing for the server to do except hand over files.
- Plugins, themes and maintenance — the WordPress tax. A typical business site runs a dozen plugins; several charge yearly, all need updating, and an outdated one is the most common way small-business sites get hacked. A site with no plugins has no plugin bill and no plugin patches.
Over three years, these can quietly add more than the original build.
What you get at our three prices
Here is our own price list, published on the pricing page and repeated here so you don’t have to hunt for it. These are starting points, before VAT where it applies; the final figure depends on scope, and you know it before any work starts.
Starter — from €300. One page, live in 7 days. Everything a local business needs on a single, well-built page: who you are, what you do, proof, and a way to get in touch. Includes a contact form with spam protection and the speed-and-carbon badge that shows visitors, in numbers, that the site is fast and light. Right for a trade, a practitioner or a new business that needs to exist properly online this month, not next quarter.
Business — from €600. Up to six pages, live in 14 days. The site most small businesses actually need: home, services, about, contact and room for two more. Includes the blog and SEO setup so Google has something to index beyond your homepage, a lead funnel (the path from “I’m curious” to “I’ve sent an enquiry”), and analytics that work without cookies, so you get numbers without a consent banner.
Flagship — from €900. A full ten-plus-page site, live in three to four weeks. For a business with several services or locations, case studies to show and specific things it needs the site to do. Includes case-study pages, custom widgets (the live CO₂ and speed meter on our own homepage is an example), and priority support after launch.
Two things are true of all three. First, every site is built the same way: hand-built, lightweight, with the speed and carbon figures measured and visible on the page rather than promised in a proposal. Second, the hosting is on Cloudflare’s network, which is fast, low-carbon and, for sites like these, free or close to it. You get the keys; if you’d rather not think about it, I can look after it for a small monthly fee.
Why the “cheap” build is often the expensive one
There is a reason we build static sites rather than installing a CMS and a theme. A page that is just files — no database, no plugins, nothing to execute on the server — loads in about a second on a phone and faster on a desktop, has nothing to hack, and costs almost nothing to host. The three demo sites in our portfolio weigh between 120 and 250 KB per page, a tenth of the median website or less, and score 98–100 on Google’s own speed test. That isn’t a special-effects budget; it’s the default when you don’t ship what you don’t need.
Speed is money in a very direct way. We’ve written up the research separately — Site speed = sales — but the short version is that visitors leave slow pages before they see your offer, and every one who leaves is an enquiry you didn’t get. A €500 site that loads instantly can out-earn a €5,000 site that takes four seconds. The price of the build and the value of the site are only loosely related; what the visitor experiences is what pays.
How to compare quotes without a technical background
You don’t need to understand code to judge a proposal. Ask five questions:
- What exactly is included? Pages, features, content, photos, post-launch support. Get it in writing.
- What will it cost me every month after launch? Hosting, plugins, maintenance, licences.
- Will I own it? The domain, the code, the content. Can I take it elsewhere?
- How fast will it be, and can you show me? Ask for the Google PageSpeed score of a site they’ve built. Anyone can claim “fast”; a number is harder to fake.
- What happens when I need a change? Hourly rate, response time, or “you’re on your own”.
A good builder answers all five without flinching. A quote that dodges any of them is the expensive kind, whatever the number at the bottom says.
The honest summary
For a small business in 2026, a well-built site from a freelancer or small studio costs between €500 and €1,500 as a one-off, plus €10–20 a year for the domain and next to nothing for hosting if it’s built right. Below that you’re paying with your own time on a builder; above that you’re paying for a team, integrations or a shop.
If you already have a site and want to know where it stands before spending anything, run it through the meter on our homepage — it shows the speed and carbon of any site next to a fast one — or ask for a free 24-hour audit. Both cost nothing, and both give you numbers to put next to any quote you receive.