How much does a website cost?

I was recently part of an email thread amongst startup founders which centered on a typical question: how much should I be expecting to spend on creating a new website.

I’ve been running a?web development agency?for the past few years, so perhaps I can make a couple of generalizations to help people gut-check what they see in the market.

Of course, the answer is always “it depends” and your milage may vary with all of this. But the goal here is simply a heuristic.

Let’s say you need a company website that does at least the following:

• Easy for a non-technical person to update
• Responsive layout
• “Modern” design that is “sleek and minimal but also classic and timeless and not too?avante grade?but also memorable and unique without sacrificing usability” (this is a joke but also every client ever)
• Informational-only (meaning you’re generally just showing content, there is no logged-in state or complex tools like a product configurator or something)
• Integration with your marketing toolkit: Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Hubspot, Salesforce, etc

Yes, you could pay $500 or $500k for that website, but here is my off-the-cuff assessment of how you could do it or what you could expect at each price tier. (Note: this assumes you’re working with a small/mid-sized agency — for huge agencies or really prestigious boutiques, multiply each tier by 3 or 4)

<$10k

• You are doing most of it yourself.
• You have designed it and are handing off to a developer to turn into an HTML site.
• Site updates can be done by editing the HTML files in the code repo and you’ve got auto-deploy setup fro the git repo to publish your static site to something like Netlify or even GitHub Pages. (This is actually a great idea if you need something?fast, have a good designer and want your marketing team to get some very light experience with dev workflows/tools)
• Your team is writing the site copy, sourcing the images and configuring any integrations (so you can simply hand the dev some code snippets to embed)
• OR: you are going to build the whole thing yourself but you need a designer to create the site for you. At this price, you aren’t getting a full brand package, but you could reasonably get a basic site design.
• OR: you have found an off-the-shelf theme for WordPress/Squarespace/Webflow that is perfect for you and you just need very minor changes, copy, images, etc.

$10k-20k

• You found a theme that is?most?of what you need, but it needs non-trivial customization. You can expect some input and guidance from your developer on theme selection. It helps to think through sitemap, etc before doing this.
• OR: you bring a design that is fairly straightforward (handful of page templates) but you need the site to be built with a CMS
• OR: if your site is ~3 basic pages and extremely simple, you’ll probably find someone to design+build in this range.
• You are providing brand strategy, talking points and a fair amount of copy but your agency might be expected to work on some wording in select areas.
• You can expect a site that works, looks nice and has whatever features were contained within the theme you selected. You’re doing the heavy lifting on copy, imagery, SEO writing, etc.

$20 - $40k

• Now you are entering the realm of custom design + custom dev. You have some specific requirements or need a few fancy interfaces in your design.
• Your integration needs for your CRM or analytics tools might be a more robust with event tracking, etc.
• Your site has an easy-to-use CMS but is likely built around specific page templates that you can customize fairly extensively but have some consistency in their layout and function. At the higher end of this range, you might be leaving templates behind in favor of components that can be mix-n-matched. Modern CMS tools are sufficiently advanced to make this a reality even in many theme options at lower price points, but by $30k+, you can be creating some custom components. An outside team that isn’t thinking this way by now is an easy red flag. Not a dealbreaker, but enough to make me question their vision.
• You are bringing the strategy and direction to the agency but they are proactively considering how to convert the ideas.
• You’re very likely still intimately involved in writing and providing imagery.

$40 - $100k

(Yes, this is a uselessly large range but once above $40k, requirements diverge rapidly. But you could safely expect about 75% of the bullets below)

• You are educating your agency team on your brand ethos, strategy and roadmap, bringing them deep into your psyche of who you are and want to be. Your agency is using that as fodder for brainstorming how your message comes to life online and is pitching you ideas for messaging, visuals and interactions.
• Your outside team is having discovery meetings to pull ideas from your head and turning them into a UI. Either your agency is creating designs from scratch or, you’ve brought them a fairly complex site design that you want to see realized.
• Your CMS is fairly advanced and your non-technical team feels capable of creating new pages and layouts without much developer help. They might still need to know a tiny bit of HTML here and there, but they work on the internet, they should be able to do that anyway.
• Some custom animations or advanced interactions could be in play in this price range, depending on your other requirements. These get expensive quickly (not just because of production — they majorly increase testing overhead)
• You might have some straightforward onboarding tools, calculators, configurators or other tools built into your site that add a layer of logic that might be tied to some of your own APIs or 3rd party marketing tools.
• You can expect some level of concierge hand-holding through the process at this price point; your agency is managing the project plan and there are likely 3-4 people of varying specialties who will touch your project through planning, design, writing and development.
• The agency is writing site copy for your approval and at this level, you might even have a photographer, depending on the project.
• You may have some very light eCommerce on your site - you sell a handful of products, have a cart and checkout flow with standard features.
• OR: you have a registration/onboarding flow on your site where you collect info from your customer, send that data to some API and funnel them to your app or the next stage of your product.

$100k+

• Welcome to the first class lounge. You are no longer a person who calls to make restaurant reservations or concerns yourself with daily schedules, you have “people” who take care of that for you. A lot of the things in the previous tier apply here as well but you can expect that once educated on where you want to go, your agency team is presenting ideas for your guidance and approval.
• This is an infinite price range, so you can’t expect to have all of these for $101k, but in the six digits, you can reasonably expect to start talking about projects that get you one of these:

1. A sophisticated publishing platform that could reasonably run a media property
2. eCommerce destination site with complex integrations for multi-vendor, marketplace, ERP or omnichannel customer experience
3. Fully tailored customer-facing tools that offer advanced logic and interaction for onboarding, registration, qualification, etc. These would be pretty advanced configurators (think Tesla.com)

• At this level, your site is more than what I laid out in the hypothetical requirements above - your site is one of your products and is a core part of your business operations.
• OR: you are a big company with multiple business units, numerous audiences and/or you operate in a highly regulated industry that requires specific compliance functions and bureaucracy

There is no “right” or “wrong” pathway in any of the above - if you find a theme that is perfect for you and you get a site done in a weekend for $500, that’s an epic win and you may get the same utility from that site as someone who needed to spend $30k for a full custom build.

A few other un-sorted comments:

• It’s very easy to say “we have a writer/designer/developer, we can just do this ourselves”. You very well could, but at least challenge your thinking by considering the opportunity cost of what your team would otherwise be doing. This is a classic build vs buy decision no different than any other strategic effort you undertake. The tradeoff is between the $$ cost of outside team and the business upside of whatever features, etc your team would otherwise be working on - plus the salary you’re paying them for the time spent working on your website. Often, that math makes $20k start to sound pretty cheap.
• You absolutely do not need a full library of React components for your informational company website. This will be expensive overkill 99.999% of the time. I expect someone somewhere to be deeply offended by this comment.
• If you need an eComm site: you need a compelling reason to use anything other than Shopify. (there are many good reasons, I’m just saying Shopify is the default from which one starts in 2021)
• If you need a content-only CMS: WordPress is the default choice that you need a good reason not to use. I am sure someone will want to fight about this. I am extremely biased, having working in WP for 10+ years, so take this with a grain of salt.
• None of the pricing tiers above including branding design or brand strategy; they all assume that you know your brand value prop and marketing strategy, can speak fluently on the topic and have a brand style. If you need that work too, add $10-$30k, which I know is a uselessly wide range but there is no one-size-fits-all.
• Similarly, if you need photography work to produce imagery for your site, expect to add $5-10k. This is a bit outside my expertise, but I believe you can get below $5k if you do some of the work (noticing a trend?) by knowing exactly what you want and finding someone to work hourly. But a photographer who knows what they are doing, can interpret your vision and realize it behind the camera and in the editing booth is worth every penny. Much like this entire topic, you can probably pay was little or as much as you want for this work.
• “This is ridiculous, I’m a lean startup and found a designer from Moldova and developer from Uruguay with UpWork and did an amazing website for $1200.” Nice! It’s very possible to do so and if you’re feeling scrappy, it’s worth a shot. In my experience, this route will leave you disappointed 90% of the time but if you find the right people and have the time/focus to do so, it's possible and awesome when it works.

Final Thought

You should pay what it takes for your to be chest-puffingly proud of your site. You should want to pull it up at dinner with friends just to show people how cool it is. Your company’s website is your top salesperson, your front-line customer service agent, several of the rings in your acquisition funnel and your first investor pitch.??If you’re selling $100k contracts, spending $40k+ on a website is easy to justify. If you’re pre-seed, building an MVP and working on your pitch, you’d be crazy to do so - go spend $1-3k for a theme, assets and some minor dev help.