What a website should cost

Website quotes in India range from forty thousand rupees to forty lakh for what sounds like the same brief. Both ends can be honest, and the brief is why.

A website is not one thing. It is design, content, build, integrations, infrastructure and the ongoing cost of keeping it alive. Quotes differ because suppliers assume different answers to questions the brief left open.

What drives the number

• How much is designed rather than chosen. A template configured well is a legitimate product. A designed site costs several times more because somebody draws every state of every component.
• Page count and template count. Twenty pages built from four templates is cheap. Twenty bespoke layouts is not.
• Who writes the words. Content is the most underestimated line in every website project, and the most common reason launches slip by months.
• Integrations. Payments, CRM, inventory, login, multi language, anything connecting to a system somebody else controls.
• Photography and film. Usually a separate budget, frequently discovered late.

Rough bands

A credible small business site on a good template, with original content and sensible technical foundations, commonly runs from about Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 5 lakh. A designed site for a brand that cares what it looks like, with custom components and real content work, from Rs 6 lakh to Rs 20 lakh. Ecommerce with integrations, or a site that is effectively an application, goes well beyond that and should be scoped as software rather than as design.

Below about a lakh you are buying a template someone else filled in. That is sometimes exactly the right purchase, and it should be described honestly rather than sold as design.

The costs that arrive later

Hosting and domain. Licences for the theme, plugins, fonts and stock. Maintenance and security updates, which are not optional on a content system. Changes after launch, which always come, and which cost a fortune when there is no retainer and no handover documentation. Ask for the annual running cost in writing before signing anything; a cheap build with an expensive tail is the standard shape of a bad deal.

What you must own

The domain, registered to you. The hosting account. The analytics property. The design source files. The content. The code, or at least a copy of it. Agencies that hold these do not usually intend to hold you hostage, and it works out that way regardless when you leave.

Comparing quotes honestly

Ask every supplier for the same four things: the number of unique templates, who writes the content, what the annual running cost will be, and what happens to the site if you stop working together. The quotes become comparable immediately, and the gap between them usually turns out to be scope rather than price.

One more thing worth paying for, which almost no quote includes by default: the migration plan. If the site is replacing an existing one, the redirects and the preserved content decide whether you keep your search traffic, as set out in redesigning without losing your rankings.