This is the question I get asked first on almost every call, and it's a fair one — the range out there is genuinely enormous, from a $50 template to a $30,000 custom build, and most of that range is defensible depending on what the business actually needs.
What actually drives the price
It's rarely the number of pages. It's what the site needs to do beyond display information. A five-page site that just describes your services and shows your phone number is a fundamentally simpler build than a five-page site with online booking, payment processing, and a customer login. The complexity lives in the functionality, not the page count.
A rough, honest range
- Simple informational site (5-8 pages, no e-commerce): typically a few hundred to low thousands, depending on how custom the design is versus template-based.
- Site with booking, payments, or a small product catalog: a meaningful step up, since you're paying for integrations that have to work reliably, not just look right.
- Full custom web application or larger e-commerce build: this is where costs can climb significantly, and rightly so — you're paying for custom development, not assembly.
The question that matters more than price
What will this site actually need to do a year from now, not just at launch? A site built cheaply to only handle today's needs often ends up rebuilt within a year, which costs more in total than building it slightly more robustly the first time. I'd rather scope a project honestly around near-term growth than sell a bare-minimum site that becomes a second project in eight months.
Get a fixed quote before any work starts, ask exactly what's included, and ask what happens after launch — hosting, updates, and small changes are often where unclear pricing quietly shows up later.