What a website costs, and where the number comes from

Open ten studio websites and count how many tell you what a site costs. Most will offer a form, a call, a conversation about your goals. What they will not offer is a number, and the number is the first thing you wanted.

Why the price is usually hidden

There are three reasons, and only one of them is honest.

The first is comparison. A published price can be held up against a cheaper one, and the cheaper one usually wins an argument it should not win. Hiding the number avoids that argument.

The second is worse. If the price is set after the call, it can be set by what the client seems able to pay. The same site costs one figure for a dentist and another for a bank. Nobody says this out loud, and it is common.

The third is fair. A studio genuinely cannot price a job it has not understood. That is true, and it is why our list prices what is knowable and quotes separately what is not.

The three numbers

A landing page is €2,400. One page, ten to fifteen working days.

A small site is €5,900. Up to six pages with its own admin, so the content can be edited without us. Twenty to thirty working days.

A full build starts at €11,900. Twelve pages and up, with the admin, eight to twelve weeks.

Where those numbers come from

They come from hours. The landing page is twenty two hours of work. The small site is fifty six. The full build is a hundred and thirteen.

Every one of them is priced at the same rate, €105 an hour, and then rounded up to a clean figure. Twenty two hours is €2,310, and we publish €2,400. Fifty six hours is €5,880, published as €5,900. A hundred and thirteen hours is €11,865, published as €11,900.

One rate, and it does not move depending on who is asking. A dentist and a bank get the same figure.

A working day here is six hours, not eight

Estimating in eight hour days is how projects slip. A day has a stand-up in it, an email that needs a real answer, a review, a file that will not export. Six hours is what is left for the work itself, and every estimate we publish is built on that number.

This matters to you for one reason: the dates beside the prices assume six, so they hold.

The hours explain the price. They are not the bill.

You are not billed by the hour. Once a scope is agreed the number is fixed, and the delivery date is written down beside it.

If we misjudge how long something takes, those extra hours are ours to absorb, not an amended invoice at the end. That is the whole point of a fixed number. An estimate that only ever moves upward is not an estimate, it is an opening bid.

The only thing that moves a price is work you add later, quoted and approved in writing before it is begun, at one rate that never climbs in the final week of a project.

Why the sixth page costs less than the first

The first page of a design is €1,200. The next four are €560 each, then €420, then €340 as the count grows. Development runs the same shape: €1,300 for the first page, then €610, €460, €370.

That is not a volume discount, it is what the work actually costs. The first page is where the type scale gets set, the colour system gets tested against contrast, the components get drawn, the build gets configured and deployed. The sixth page reuses every one of those decisions. Charging the same for it would be charging twice for the same thinking.

What the number does not include

Work with software behind it is scoped on its own. Customer logins, payments, a dashboard, anything with rules and state.

The reason is simple. A brochure site is sized by how many pages it has. Software is sized by what it has to do, and those two things have nothing to do with each other. A single screen can be more work than twelve pages. Quoting it from a page count would be guessing, and we would rather say so than publish a number we cannot hold.

What you own at the end

The repository, the design files, the domain and every account, transferred on final payment. No licence back to us, and nothing held to keep you dependent on us to run what you paid for.

This belongs in a piece about cost because it is part of the price. A site you cannot move is cheaper on the invoice and more expensive for the rest of its life.

Read it before you call us

The full list is on our pricing page, every service with its figure, from a single social design to a full build. Work out a budget, decide whether it is a conversation worth having, and only then get in touch.

That is the entire idea. You should not need to speak to a salesperson to find out whether you can afford something.