Ask five companies to quote for "a website" and you will get five numbers that do not look like they describe the same job. That is not usually dishonesty. It is that "a website" covers a five-page brochure site and a 2,000-SKU store with equal accuracy, and nobody asked which one you meant.
This is the breakdown we use when we quote. It is worth reading even if you end up hiring someone else, because it gives you the vocabulary to compare two proposals properly.
The five things you are actually paying for
- DesignWireframes, then the visual design of each unique page type. The cost scales with the number of distinct layouts, not the number of pages — twenty blog posts share one template, so they are one design, not twenty.
- Front-end buildTurning the design into working, responsive pages. This is where "looks fine on my laptop" becomes "works on a ₹8,000 Android phone on a 3G connection", which is most of your Indian traffic.
- Back-end and integrationsAnything that stores or fetches data: enquiry forms, logins, payments, inventory, a CRM hand-off, WhatsApp notifications. This is the single biggest swing factor in any quote.
- ContentCopywriting, photography, product data entry. Most budget overruns we see are here, because it is the one part clients assume they will do themselves and then do not have time for.
- Running itDomain, hosting, SSL, email, backups, and someone to call when it breaks. Small, recurring, and the part people forget to budget for entirely.
Rough ranges, and what moves them
A five-to-eight page business website with a contact form, built on a solid stack and genuinely fast, is a few tens of thousands of rupees. A site with a blog, multiple service pages, location pages and proper SEO groundwork is several times that. An e-commerce store with payments, inventory and shipping integrations is a different category again, and a custom platform with user accounts and a dashboard is a different category after that.
We are deliberately not printing a rate card, because a number without your scope attached to it would be wrong for almost everyone reading this. What we will do is send an itemised estimate against your actual requirement within one business day, with each line priced separately so you can see what you are buying.
What you can safely cut
- Custom illustrationBeautiful, and almost never the reason someone does or does not enquire. Licensed stock, chosen carefully, gets you 90% of the way for a fraction of the cost.
- Animation beyond the basicsA tasteful fade costs nothing. Scroll-driven sequences cost real money and slow the page down, which costs you rankings.
- A CMS you will never openIf you edit the site twice a year, a full content management system is an expense and a security surface for nothing. Ask for a quote both ways.
- Phase two, in phase oneThe loyalty programme, the mobile app, the multilingual version. Build the thing that earns money first, then fund the rest from it.
What you should not cut
Speed, mobile layout, and the enquiry path. A slow site loses visitors before it loses rankings, most of your visitors are on a phone, and a form that fails silently on a mid-range Android will quietly cost you more than the whole build.
Also do not cut ownership. Whatever you pay, the source code, the domain, the hosting account and the analytics property should be in your name from day one. A cheap build you cannot take anywhere is not cheap.
Frequently asked questions
Why is one quote ₹20,000 and another ₹2,00,000 for the same brief?
Usually because they are not quoting the same work. The cheaper one is often a template with your logo dropped in, no content work, and no post-launch support; the expensive one may include custom design, integrations and a maintenance window. Ask both for a line-by-line breakdown and the difference becomes obvious in about two minutes.
Is a template cheaper than a custom website?
Up front, yes, and for some businesses that is the right answer. The cost shows up later: templates carry code you do not need, which makes them slower, and they fight you the moment you want something the template did not anticipate. If your site is a brochure, a template is fine. If it is part of how you operate, it usually is not.
What does it cost to keep a website running each year?
Domain, hosting and SSL are small and predictable. The variable part is maintenance — updates, backups, security patches and small changes. We cover what that includes in our maintenance article; the honest range for a small business site is a few thousand rupees a month.
Want this applied to your project?
Send us what you have — even a rough note. You'll get a written scope, a fixed quote and a delivery date within one business day, with no obligation.