TL;DR
A website quote is hours multiplied by a rate. Nothing else. When two agencies quote wildly different numbers for "the same site", they are not pricing the same work - one of them has assumed away half of it.
This article does not publish a price list. It gives you the hours, so you can read any quote you receive and see what is missing from it.
Why the same brief gets very different numbers
"A company website, about ten pages" is not a specification. It is a wish. Two builders reading it can honestly arrive at estimates that differ five times over, because they filled the gaps differently:
- Who writes the text? If nobody says, one assumes the client sends it and the other budgets for writing it. That alone is days.
- Where do the images come from? Stock, a photo shoot, or the client's folder of phone pictures that need editing.
- What happens to the old site? Nothing, a redirect map, or a full content migration with URL matching.
- Multilingual? A second language is rarely "the same site twice". It is a content model, a URL scheme, hreflang, and a translation workflow.
- What must it integrate with? An accounting system, a warehouse, a courier, a CRM. Each is its own project attached to the first.
A quote that arrives without these questions being asked is a guess. It will be corrected later, and the correction is called a change request.
The hours that actually go in
These are the ranges we see on real projects, per month of ongoing work rather than per build - the shape is what matters:
| Work | Hours/month |
|---|---|
| Infrastructure and deployment | 4-6 |
| Integrations | 4-6 |
| Security and updates | 2-3 |
| Fixing what breaks | 3-5 |
| SEO maintenance | 5-8 |
| Reporting | 2-3 |
That is 20-31 hours a month for a site that is alive. A build is a separate, larger block up front. The point of the table is not our numbers - it is that a site is not finished when it launches, and a quote that covers only the build has priced about half of what you will actually spend.
The costs that appear after launch
- Content. The site is empty until someone fills it, and that someone is usually not budgeted.
- Search. A new site is invisible for months. Being found is separate work, and it starts before launch, not after.
- Hosting and domains. Small money, but recurring, and someone must own the renewals.
- The second round of changes. Everyone has one. The question is whether the contract has room for it or treats it as an extra.
What to ask before you sign
- How many hours is this, and at what rate? If the answer is only a total, you cannot compare two offers at all.
- What is explicitly NOT included? A good answer is a list, not "everything is included".
- Who owns the code and the accounts? Domain, hosting, analytics, repository. This is the question people regret not asking.
- What happens in month four? If there is no answer, there is no maintenance plan, and the site starts ageing the day it launches.
- What did you build that is like this? Not a portfolio grid - a live site with real traffic you can look at.
Maintenance is a separate line, and it should be
"The site is done" is the most expensive sentence in this business. Plugins update, certificates expire, a payment provider changes an API, a catalogue grows past what the original queries handle. Maintenance priced as a monthly pool of hours is honest; maintenance priced as "we'll fix it if something breaks" is a bill waiting to happen.
How we quote
We answer with hours, and we say what is not in them. The web development page describes what we build; for a shop with a real catalogue see online stores. A quote comes back within 3 working days, and it is a specification with hours attached, not a single number. Tell us what you need - the more specific you are, the smaller the gap between the quote and the final invoice.