Ask five people to quote the same website and you will get ₹3,000, ₹18,000, ₹45,000, ₹1,20,000 and ₹3,00,000. All five are quoting honestly. They are just not quoting the same thing, and almost nobody explains which thing they're selling.
Here is the version we'd give a friend.
What actually moves the price
Not the number of pages. Page count is what agencies bill on because it's easy to count, but a five-page brochure site and a five-page site with a booking engine are different projects by an order of magnitude.
Four things genuinely move the number:
- Whether the design is made or chosen. Picking a theme and recolouring it takes an afternoon. Designing a layout that has never existed takes days, and it's most of what separates the bands below.
- Whether anything has to remember something. The moment a site needs accounts, orders, bookings, inventory or a database, you have crossed from a website into software, and software is priced differently.
- How many other systems it has to talk to. Payments, courier APIs, a CRM, an inventory tool. Every integration is a small project with its own failure modes.
- Who is accountable when it breaks at 11pm. This is the one nobody prices out loud, and it's the difference between a freelancer who stops replying and a studio that answers.
The bands, honestly
| What you get | Realistic range |
|---|---|
| A theme, recoloured, your copy dropped in | ₹3,000 – ₹8,000 |
| One custom page, designed and coded for you | ₹7,500 – ₹15,000 |
| A full custom multi-page site | ₹15,000 – ₹40,000 |
| A storefront that actually sells | ₹20,000 – ₹60,000 |
| Custom systems — accounts, portals, backends | ₹32,000 – ₹1,00,000 |
| Agency, with account managers in the middle | ₹1,50,000+ |
Two notes on that table. The bottom row is not a scam — big companies genuinely need project managers, contracts and someone to sue. And the top row is not always wrong, which is the subject of the other post.
The costs nobody mentions
The build is a one-off. The site is not. Budget for these before you sign anything, because they arrive whether you planned for them or not:
- Domain — ₹800–₹1,500 a year, forever.
- Hosting — ₹0 to ₹500 a month for most small sites. Genuinely ₹0 on modern static hosting, which is what a lot of "hosting charges" quietly are.
- Email on your domain — ₹150–₹250 per person per month, and worth every rupee over a Gmail address on your business card.
- Changes — the real one. Either you can edit it yourself, or every price change is an email and a wait. Ask which before you buy.
- Payment gateway — around 2% of every transaction, forever. Not the developer's fee; it's the gateway's.
The question that reveals everything
Ask any quote: "who owns the code, and can I take it to someone else?"
If the answer is anything other than a plain yes, you are not buying a website. You are renting one, and the rent goes up when you try to leave. This is the single most useful question in the entire process and it takes four seconds to ask.
What we'd tell you to do
If you're pre-revenue and testing an idea, buy the cheapest thing that works and spend the money on finding out whether anyone wants what you're selling. A beautiful site for a business nobody wants is an expensive way to be wrong.
If the site is the business — if it's where people decide whether to trust you — then the gap between a ₹5,000 site and a ₹20,000 site is not decoration. It's whether the thing converts.
And if someone quotes you ₹3,00,000, ask them to show you what the extra ₹2,50,000 does. Sometimes there's a real answer. Often there isn't.
We publish every number rather than making you ask — tiers, add-ons, retainers and what each one includes.
See The Pricing →