What a website actually costs, and why nobody will tell you
Agencies hide pricing because the number is a negotiation, not a fact. Here is the real breakdown of what moves the figure, and what you are actually paying for.
By Shashi Kumar ·
Ask ten agencies what a website costs and ten of them will say "it depends". They are not lying. They are just not telling you what it depends on.
So here it is.
The base is the smallest honest number
A single-page site — one goal, one call to action, no accounts, no database — starts at ₹2,000. That is not a loss leader. It is genuinely what it costs when the scope is that small and the decisions are already made.
Everything above that is not "a better website". It is more machinery.
What actually moves the number
Four things, in order of impact:
- State. The moment a website has to remember something — a user, an order, a submission — you have added a database, an admin surface and a whole category of failure. This is the single biggest jump in any quote.
- Roles. One kind of user is easy. Two kinds who see different things is more than twice the work, because now every screen has a permissions question attached to it.
- Money. Payments bring compliance, refunds, failure states, reconciliation and a support burden. A payment button is a week of work pretending to be an afternoon.
- Integrations. Every external system is a contract you do not control. Their downtime becomes your bug report.
Notice what is not on that list: page count. Ten pages of content is barely more work than five. Clients consistently over-weight page count and under-weight state.
What you are paying for that you cannot see
- Someone deciding what not to build. The most expensive thing in software is a feature nobody needed, built well.
- Error paths. The happy path is maybe a third of the work. The rest is what happens when the upload fails, the card is declined, the session expires.
- The handover. Code you can give to someone else. Deployment that someone else can run. This is the difference between an asset and a hostage situation.
Why fixed prices are usually better than hourly
Hourly rewards slowness. Fixed scope rewards clarity. If I can quote you a fixed number, it means we both understand the problem well enough to bound it — and that understanding is worth more than the discount you would get by paying by the hour.
I quote hourly only when the work is genuinely open-ended: an ongoing engagement, an unclear legacy system, a research phase. That is $20/hour, with a ten-hour minimum.
The uncomfortable part
A cheap website that does not bring you customers is not cheap. It is a slow, ongoing loss with a low sticker price.
That is not an argument for spending more. It is an argument for being ruthless about what the site has to achieve before anyone opens a code editor. Most of the money I have saved clients was saved in the first conversation, not in the build.
If you want a real number, the calculator on my site gives you one in about a minute. No form, no callback, no "let's hop on a quick call".
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