How Much Does a Website Cost in 2026? Real Agency Pricing Ranges

How much does a website cost in 2026? From a professional agency, a typical small business website now runs between $1,500 and $5,000, an e-commerce store between $4,000 and $15,000, and a custom web application or MVP rarely starts below $15,000. At KorTechX we quote transparent entry packages from $699 for a business site and $1,999 for an e-commerce store, with every larger build scoped individually, so treat those figures as realistic planning ranges rather than marketing numbers.

This guide exists because most of the quotes you collect will feel arbitrary. One designer asks for $800, another for $12,000, and both sound confident. The difference is rarely greed and almost always scope, technology, content and team quality. Read this before you compare quotes so you can separate a genuinely expensive build from a genuinely better one.

Quick numbers for 2026: a typical agency website for a small business costs $1,500 to $5,000 and takes 3 to 6 weeks. E-commerce runs $4,000 to $15,000 and takes 6 to 12 weeks. Custom web apps start around $15,000. KorTechX entry packages start at $699 for a business site and $1,999 for e-commerce. After launch, budget $30 to $350 per month for hosting, maintenance and updates, and remember that content typically adds 25 to 40 percent to the build price.

Key takeaways

• A realistic 2026 budget for a small business website is $1,500 to $5,000 from an agency, with entry packages from around $699 if you supply content and keep the scope fixed.
• Freelancers charge less per hour, but you inherit their risk: availability, capacity, illness and how long they stay in business.
• Content, copy and imagery often make up 25 to 40 percent of the total project cost, yet it is usually the first thing a budget cuts.
• A website is never a one-off expense; expect $30 to $350 per month across hosting, domain, maintenance, security and updates.
• Most of the gap between two similar-looking quotes is scope ambiguity, not quality, and fixing scope in writing is the fastest way to stop overpaying.

What really drives the price of a website?

Six factors decide roughly 90 percent of the price difference between any two quotes for the same-looking project. Once you understand them, a $1,200 quote and a $9,800 quote stop looking random and start looking like different products with the same label.

1. Scope and page count

Every page is design time, layout work, copy placement, image selection, mobile testing and quality assurance. A five-page brochure site and a twenty-five-page content site are not the same product, even though both are called a website. As a planning rule, agencies price template-based pages at around $60 to $150 per finished page and custom-designed pages at $300 to $900 per page. On that math a ten-page site sits between $1,000 and $3,000 before anything else is added, which is why pushing extra pages into a quote is the single fastest way to inflate a price. Decide your page list before you ask for prices, not after, and put it in writing.

2. Functionality beyond text and pictures

Forms, calendars, bookings, payments, memberships and dashboards each add real engineering time, and this is where quotes diverge hardest. To keep the numbers honest, a contact form is roughly $200 to $500 of work, a simple booking or appointment system $1,500 to $4,000, and a payment or membership integration $1,000 to $3,000 on top of the store itself. The decision rule is simple: add only features that directly produce a booking, an enquiry or a sale. Every feature you describe as a nice-to-have during the sales call is, in contract terms, a price increase with an asterisk.

3. Technology choices

WordPress with a page builder is the cheapest reliable way to a polished result fast and is the right choice for most brochure and content sites. Shopify is the strongest option when you want a store live quickly with modest ongoing engineering. WooCommerce on WordPress makes sense when you already live on WordPress and want tight control over the storefront. A custom build with React or Next.js costs more upfront but wins on speed, security and long-term flexibility, which is why it only justifies itself for web applications, unusual integrations or sites where performance is the product. Matching the tool to the job is a pricing decision, not a taste decision.

4. Content and creative work

Copywriting is commonly quoted at $30 to $75 per hour or $50 to $150 per page of finished, conversion-focused copy, and professional photography or illustration costs more again. On a typical project, content of all kinds eats 25 to 40 percent of the budget. Many agencies quote the build expecting you to supply the words, then bill copy as an add-on after you sign. Ask on the very first call who writes the copy and what it costs, because that single ambiguity is the most common source of a quote that looks cheap and arrives expensive.

5. Speed and Core Web Vitals

In 2026 cheap page builders and unoptimised themes are still shipping pages that take three or four seconds to render, and for most service businesses that is a running cost, not a saving. The practical performance targets are the Core Web Vitals: an LCP under 2.5 seconds, an INP under 200 milliseconds and a CLS under 0.1. Meeting those budgets is possible even on shared hosting, but it takes discipline in image handling, caching and script loading. A quote that never mentions performance is a quote that expects you not to care about it, and you should care from day one rather than discovering the problem in your analytics after launch.

Practically, fixing performance later is more expensive than building it in. Retrofitting image compression, a content delivery network, caching and script cleanup onto an already-launched site typically runs $300 to $800, and it is the fix most owners defer until the analytics embarrass them. Sites budgeted for performance from the start usually cost about the same as sites that ignore it, because the discipline lives in hosting and image setup rather than in extras. The most common performance penalty in 2026 is not a cash cost at all; it is a checklist that nobody ever ran.

6. Team quality and location

The same hours cost different amounts depending on who performs them. As honest working numbers, freelancers commonly bill $40 to $80 per hour, agencies $90 to $150 per hour, and offshore teams $20 to $50 per hour. Put an agency on one hundred hours and the math lands around $9,000 to $15,000; a freelancer on identical hours lands at $4,000 to $8,000. The gap is not skill in every case; it is process, liability, coverage after a project ends and a second pair of eyes on your work. Slow, careful, well-reviewed work is usually the cheaper work over the life of a site, because the most expensive hour on any project is the one spent redoing another team's mistakes.

Reading a real quote: a worked example

To see how these levers combine, here is a typical itemised estimate for a six-page business website from a small agency, and it is the shape of quote you should be asking every provider for. Visual design is around $800, development and template configuration $850, page builds and content placement for six pages $600 at $100 each, image sourcing and optimisation $250, mobile and accessibility testing plus quality assurance $350, and project management with two revision rounds $350. That totals roughly $3,200 before content. Add your supplied copy and the number stays near $3,200; add professional copywriting and photography and the same scope realistically lands closer to $4,400. Compare any quote you receive against this shape: an estimate without lines is an estimate you cannot check.

Equally important as what a quote includes is what it excludes. Standard exclusions across the industry include content migration from an old site, domain and email set-up, stock photography beyond a small allowance, paid plugin and theme licences, and anything touching third-party systems such as payroll or accounting software. A quote that does not list exclusions is not freer, it is less honest. When you add the typical cost of those exclusions, content migration at $8 to $12 per page, set-up fees of $50 to $150 per integration, and licences of $60 to $200 per year, a quote can easily carry another 10 to 20 percent of late surprises. You are not paying to be difficult; you are paying to have the boundary drawn before work starts, and it is always cheaper to draw it early.

Run the same shape over a fifteen-product WooCommerce store and the itemised pattern holds: theme and store configuration $1,200, product imports at fifteen times $10, payment and shipping configuration $600, order and email templates $400, testing and a security review $500, and a design system of $900, touching roughly $3,700 before content and photography. Add professional product photography at $25 to $60 per image and the store starts to justify its slot in the upper band, while a $1,999 entry package works the same way over a small fixed catalogue. The lesson is consistent in every case: each line is hours, and hours are honest to estimate once you know the going rate for the type of work.

Realistic pricing ranges by site type in 2026

The table below shows typical agency planning ranges for the most common projects, alongside realistic timelines. These are what the quotes cover on paper, not the cheapest possible version of each project, and KorTechX entry packages sit at the bottom of each band with everything beyond that scoped individually.

Site type	Typical range	Timeline
Brochure or local service site, 5 to 10 pages	$1,500 - $5,000	3 to 6 weeks
Content and lead-generation site, 15 to 30 pages	$3,000 - $9,000	6 to 10 weeks
E-commerce store, 20 to 100 products	$4,000 - $18,000	6 to 12 weeks
Custom web application or MVP	$15,000 - $60,000 plus	8 to 16 weeks
Refresh or redesign of an existing site	$800 - $3,500	2 to 4 weeks

A note on currencies: the figures in this guide are in US dollars because they are the clearest common reference for the US, Canadian, UK, Australian, New Zealand and UAE clients we work with. As rough planning equivalents, a GBP budget of £1,500 to £4,000 and an AUD budget of $2,300 to $7,000 land in the same purchasing range as the US $2,000 to $5,000 band once you account for local labour rates and VAT where relevant. Convert every quote into one currency before you compare, because an American figure in dollars and a British figure in pounds are often closer than they look at first glance.

Brochure and local service sites

A well-built brochure site covers five to ten pages: home, services, about, process, testimonials, contact and a privacy page. Most local businesses, trades, consultants and professional practices genuinely do not need more than this to compete. In our experience across the UK, US, Canada and Spain, the majority of serious enquiries for this type of site land between $1,999 and $3,900 rather than at the extremes, and KorTechX's $699 entry package covers a fixed six-page core. Anything below roughly $1,000 usually signals a reused template, thin support and no real project management, and you will pay for that later in rebuild costs. For a deeper small-business view, our separate breakdown of how much a small business website should cost runs the same numbers with more detail.

Content and lead-generation sites

Add real editorial content, an active blog, case studies and search-optimised structure and you move into the $3,000 to $9,000 band with a six-to-ten-week build. The extra money buys user research, a content structure aimed at what people actually search for, on-page SEO built into the page templates and the discipline to keep load times within the Core Web Vitals budgets. If you are a service business competing on Google for local intent, this is usually the band that pays for itself fastest, and it is also the band where an agency earns its keep rather than a template doing the work.

E-commerce stores

An online store is a brochure site plus products, payments, shipping, tax and order flows, and the pricing reflects it. A typical $4,000 to $18,000 store builds in assumptions like these: fifty products at $6 to $12 each to import, describe and photograph, which is $300 to $600 alone, plus payment gateway set-up, email templates and shipping rules on top of a normal build. KorTechX quotes entry e-commerce packages from $1,999 on fixed product counts, then scopes catalogues beyond that individually. The Shopify versus WooCommerce choice usually decides the lower half of the range, while custom storefront engineering decides the top; pick the platform that matches how quickly you need to launch and how much control you want later.

Custom web applications and MVPs

Once the project has logins, user accounts, databases, calculators, dashboards or integrations with other software, you have left website territory and entered application territory. A meaningful MVP on React or Next.js typically sits between $15,000 and $60,000 at planning stage because design, product decisions, engineering and testing are all multiplied. Small teams sometimes ship an MVP for less, but the risk of technical debt and rework is higher. This is the one category where a written scope document stops being a formality and becomes the entire point of the engagement; without it, every meeting becomes a negotiation about what was actually promised.

Redesigns and refreshes

Redesigning an existing site is cheaper than a new build only when the content, domain and technology stay put. A visual refresh on the same WordPress setup, same pages and same content usually runs $800 to $3,500 over two to four weeks. The moment a redesign means migrating platforms, rewriting content or moving to a new CMS, it stops being a refresh and becomes a new build, and the price moves accordingly. This is the least understood distinction in the industry, and it is why refresh quotes vary so wildly: you are usually comparing two different projects that happen to share a verb.

One honest caveat about the lower bound of every range: entry packages such as KorTechX's $699 business site exist to serve fixed, well-understood scopes, and they are deliberately narrow. They cover the agreed core pages, standard design and launch; anything you cannot describe inside that fixed list is priced separately, usually modestly. Any provider advertising a remarkable bargain will draw the same line somewhere, so the professional move is to read the boundary before comparing it against a full-service quote. Cheaper is rarely worse purely for being cheap; it is worse when the boundary is a surprise.

It also pays to simulate the low-quote route before committing to it. A common pattern is an $800 fixed-price quote that finishes closer to $1,900, not through dishonesty but through a narrow reading of scope: the provider includes the template and the pages but not the images, the copy polish, the two extra enquiries you asked for mid-build, the mobile fixes that were needed once the site went live, or the set-up of analytics and forms. Track every line of the original quote against each invoice, and ask one pointed question the moment the first add-on appears: was this in the agreed scope, or is this a new boundary? Defensible answers are simply the price of clarity; indefensible ones are exactly what the checklist later in this guide exists to catch.

Freelancer, agency or offshore: what you are really paying for

Most buyers instinctively sort by price per hour, but the right question is what those hours imply for risk. A freelancer at $60 per hour and an agency at $120 per hour both produce a website; the difference appears when a WordPress security release breaks a plugin on a Friday night, or when a mid-build change request arrives and there is no margin left to absorb it. Freelancers perform well when scope is small, design is stable and you can tolerate some delay, because one person is your entire supply chain. Agencies perform well when the site matters to revenue, because there is redundancy, review and usually a written standard for backups, security and handover. Offshore teams bring the lowest hourly rate but the highest relationship overhead: time zones, communication and the tendency of loosely written scopes to come back loosely interpreted. The honest way to compare all three is delivered quality over two years, not the headline hourly rate, and for most businesses the sensible middle is a small specialist agency that publishes its starting prices, such as the web development services KorTechX offers, and that will put a named person in front of you for the whole project.

The freelancer trade-off, honestly

• Pros: the lowest cost of entry, direct communication with the person doing the work, and often very fast on tight timelines.
• Cons: a single point of failure, variable reliability after launch, and less process discipline without a contracting culture around it.
• Works when: the site is small, you manage the relationship well, and downtime or delays are acceptable.

The agency trade-off, honestly

• Pros: team redundancy, a defined process, usually a written standard for security, backups and handover, and support that survives staff holidays.
• Cons: the highest hourly rate in the comparison, and sometimes more hand-off between people than you would like.
• Works when: the site carries revenue, compliance or reputation, or you want one accountable person who carries the whole delivery.

The offshore trade-off, honestly

• Pros: the lowest hours-based cost, a huge talent pool, and genuinely strong specialists if you know exactly what to commission.
• Cons: communication overhead, time-zone drag, and the highest chance that a loosely written scope comes back loosely interpreted.
• Works when: you can write precise specifications, manage the project yourself and tolerate slower feedback loops.

The decision procedure, boiled down: choose a freelancer when the site is small, the deadline is flexible and you can live with the risk of a single person. Choose an agency when the site protects revenue or reputation, or when you want process discipline without having to supply it yourself. Choose offshore only when you can write precise specifications and run the project yourself. And if the project matters but the budget sits between a full agency and a freelancer, ask a small agency for a fixed-scope package; the fixed scope removes most of the reason an agency quote felt intimidating in the first place.

What a cheap website actually costs you long term

Cheap usually means one of two things: a fixed low price from an agency that plans to reuse a template heavily, or a race-to-the-bottom build offshore. Both carry a hidden bill that shows up after launch. A $500 template build can look fine on a laptop and perform poorly on mobile, load slowly and skip basic on-page SEO, and each of those carries a direct revenue cost. Slower, unoptimised pages convert worse and rank below faster competitors, a point we develop in full in our breakdown of why slow sites lose customers.

There is also the rebuild cycle. A genuinely cheap build is usually thrown away within twelve to eighteen months when the business outgrows it or the template shows its limits, and the original fee is gone entirely. Run the arithmetic: a $500 build, a $2,500 rebuild after eighteen months, and one lost enquiry per month at a $2,000 average order value, and the cheap option has cost more than a proper build would have within its first six months. Cheap websites are not budget purchases; they are deferred purchases at a penalty rate.

A worked example makes the long-term cost concrete. Picture a single-practice dental clinic choosing between a $700 template site and a $3,500 properly built local site. The cheaper option loads slowly and ranks on page two for the two searches that matter, while the built site sits in the top three and converts well. If the clinic gets four fewer new-patient enquiries per month on the cheap site and a new patient is worth $900 across their lifetime, that is $3,600 in forgone revenue per month, which makes the expensive site the bargain within six weeks. That calculation flatters nobody, and it is why the cheapest websites are almost always the most expensive ones for businesses that depend on enquiries.

DIY page builders deserve an honest mention here. A $15 to $40 monthly subscription is a reasonable place to start for a personal project or a quick landing page, and the risk profile is clearly yours. The same subscription starts costing real money when your business depends on the site: no dedicated support, a slower performance ceiling as pages and catalogue grow, and a painful migration the day you finally need a platform that can scale.

Neglect is the quiet sibling of cheapness. The same site that nobody updates is the site whose outdated plugin gets compromised, whose payment flow breaks mid-launch, and whose backups turn out to have been overwriting the same full disk for months. For an e-commerce business, the cost of one afternoon of downtime at typical order volumes is usually greater than a year of proper maintenance, an arithmetic that makes $50 to $350 per month look like the best margin improvement on the whole budget. Budget for upkeep the way you budget for a phone contract: it is not optional; it is the price of the asset continuing to exist.

There is one more option that rarely appears in this kind of decision: hiring in-house. A junior to mid-weight web designer or developer on a full-time salary effectively costs $3,000 to $9,000 per month once salary, equipment and management time are counted, and most small businesses only need that capacity for the two or three months of a build. Unless the site will be under continuous development for years, the numbers rarely support the hire, which is why the useful question is not whether you can afford the skill but whether the site will generate enough work to justify a permanent salary forever. For almost every service business, buying the build and paying modest upkeep is the cheaper arithmetic.

The recurring costs nobody shows you in the quote

Every website has a monthly bill whether you budget for it or not. Ignoring that is exactly how sites go unmaintained, get hacked and quietly slide down the rankings. The practical monthly buckets look like this:

Monthly bucket	What it covers	Typical monthly cost
Minimum viable	shared hosting, domain (amortised), SSL, occasional plugin updates	$10 - $40
Standard upkeep	managed or better hosting, backups, CMS and plugin updates, light edits and support	$50 - $120
Business care	everything above plus proactive security, a CDN, monthly content tweaks and performance checks	$150 - $350
Marketing-driven	care plan plus SEO or advertising retainers and ongoing optimisation	$400 - $1,200

On the hardware side, shared hosting from honest providers such as Hostinger runs $2 to $4 per month on the entry plans, with a quality-relevant step up to managed WordPress hosting or a small VPS at $15 to $60 per month. A domain costs roughly $12 to $15 per year, professional email adds $5 to $15 per mailbox per month, and SSL certificates are normally free through your host or Cloudflare rather than a billed add-on.

Beyond hosting and maintenance, subscription prices matter. Shopify costs $29 to $99 per month for the platform before apps, while WooCommerce is free software that leans on higher-grade hosting, paid extensions and a developer for upkeep; the two usually land inside the same monthly band once everything is included. Page builders and theme licences add small recurring fees of their own, so fold the subscriptions into the monthly total before you sign, not after.

Maintenance is the figure most people miss in the initial comparison: CMS and plugin updates, backups that are actually tested to restore, uptime monitoring and security scans realistically run $50 to $300 per month when a real team will answer when something breaks. Search-engine optimisation retainers for a genuine service business generally start around $300 to $600 per month, and full content-plus-performance programmes push toward $1,000. Apply one decision rule across every line: if a monthly fee cannot be explained in terms of a deliverable, decline it, but never confuse an unexplained fee with the absence of any ongoing cost at all, because the ongoing cost exists either way.

Small annual costs deserve an honest line too. Domains renew at roughly $12 to $15, premium themes and plugins at $60 to $200 per licence, and business email at $5 to $15 per mailbox per month, and owners routinely discover them only at renewal. The related trap is double-counting: one quote has a line for SSL, another quietly folds it into hosting, and only one of those is a real cost. A safer mental model is to treat every website as a subscription with a build cost attached, then ask one question of each recurring line: does this run, protect or grow the site? Cut the lines that do none of those. The difference between a $25 monthly bill and a $350 one is usually not hostility; it is whether someone is on the hook to answer when the site breaks.

Realistic monthly budgets by owner type

A solo service provider can keep the site at minimum viable level: shared hosting, a domain, professional email and quarterly reviews, landing around $25 to $60 per month. A growing business that treats the site as a lead machine should budget the standard upkeep band of $50 to $120 per month plus a modest content update allowance. An e-commerce brand has no cheaper option than the business care band of $150 to $350 per month, because transactional sites breach, break and leak revenue far faster than brochure sites, and the responsible upkeep cost reflects that reality.

How to control your cost without cutting corners

Fix the scope on paper before anyone prices it

The most effective lever in the entire industry is a written scope agreed before a deposit changes hands: the exact page list, the features named explicitly, who supplies each piece of content, how many revision rounds are included and what happens after launch. A scope is a price ceiling. Without one, the definition of done drifts and change requests multiply, and every change request is a new invoice. Handing a prepared scope to three providers is the closest thing to a fair price comparison that exists, and it is also the closest thing to a guarantee against surprise costs.

Get your content ready before you brief anyone

If you supply finished, accurate copy, real images and a rough sitemap, you remove 25 to 40 percent of most quotes and skip the delays that push budgets up. As arithmetic, a client who writes their own copy to a decent standard typically saves $600 to $1,600 on a typical small site, roughly the difference between an entry package and a full-service quote on the same fixed pages. Providers who quote content-ready clients at lower prices do so because the work becomes predictable and quicker to finish, which is also why agencies will happily upsell their copywriting instead; decide which you want before the call, not during it.

Page builder versus custom: the honest decision rule

If you can describe your site as a standard layout with headers, text, images and a form, you do not need custom code and should not pay for it. If you need logins, sensitive data, unusual workflows, heavy integrations or punishing performance targets, a custom build is the cheaper option over time, because retrofitting a builder to do that work costs more and fights you for years. Most buyers over-order the technology and under-order the content; the rare balanced brief is the one that pays the least for what it actually needs.

Buy what drives revenue and enquiries

Every element of the build should pass one test: does it produce an enquiry, a booking or a sale? A testimonial slider and a hero animation fail that test; a clear pricing page and a short enquiry form pass it easily. When money is tight, spend it on the pages a customer will actually use to decide, and keep the decorative extras for a budget you will not need if you make five good decisions here.

Ask for a phased quote and run your own numbers

Ask providers for an A-build and a B-build on the same page list, one with the full feature set and one stripped to the essentials, so the difference reads as a number rather than a mystery. Then run your own estimate before any sales call, using the free website cost calculator at KorTechX, which walks through page counts, features and content so you arrive with grounded expectations instead of leaving the room guessing.

Finally, phase the work when the budget is genuinely tight. Sensible phasing asks for the money pages that generate enquiries first, the marketing essentials second, and content and integrations third, each phase priced against the same written scope. Phasing does not reduce the total, but it moves cost onto cash flow and gives you a live site to learn from before the next phase begins. A provider who refuses to phase a standard build is usually guarding a margin against scope creep rather than protecting the project, and that response is, by itself, useful information.

The cheapest legitimate savings, ranked

When every number in a quote feels negotiable, these are the savings that cost you nothing in quality, in order of impact:

1. Write honest copy before you brief anyone; it is the single largest discount available.
2. Fix the page list and feature list in writing, then ask for a quote on exactly that.
3. Supply real images and brand files rather than paying for art direction from scratch.
4. Accept the template, builder or platform the provider recommends instead of paying for open-ended options.
5. Enter text-only pages yourself inside the page builder once the provider has set the layout.
6. Book the build outside the agency's peak season, when spare capacity makes pricing softer.
7. Take the maintenance retainer for the first year; deferred upkeep is the most expensive saving on this list.

Notice what is not on this list: nobody should cut testing, mobile optimisation or the launch checklist, because those three cost the least and lose the most when skipped.

Signs you are overpaying

Overpaying is not always about the biggest number; it is about paying more than the delivered work justifies. Watch for these signals:

• No page-by-page or feature-by-feature breakdown, which means the quote is impossible to compare against anything else you collect.
• Per-page pricing for pages that are screenfuls of text dropped into an existing template, where the marginal cost of another page is minutes, not days.
• Separate billing for copywriting when you supplied the copy yourself, often slipped into a later invoice after the build number was agreed.
• No mention of speed, mobile performance, backups or what happens after launch, which is how the expensive surprises defer themselves into your first months.
• Every change beyond the fine print of the agreement arriving as a formal change order, even the ones a reasonable contract would treat as normal.
• A figure two or three times the top of the typical range for your site type with no scope explanation that justifies it.
• A recurring monthly fee that comes with no deliverable you could name, decline or cancel on reasonable notice.

The reverse risk deserves equal weight: an unusually low quote is not a bargain, it is an invitation to rebuild in a year. The aim is neither to pay the least nor to pay the market mid-point; it is to pay a defensible price for exactly the work you need, which is why every sign above is about mismatches between price and work rather than about raw numbers.

Questions to ask before you sign anything

Take these onto the call, ideally with your prepared page list in front of you, and write the answers into the contract rather than trusting memory. Two rules make the answers useful: record them, because a verbal promise has no weight in a dispute, and compare responses across providers, because the pattern of hedging is the real signal. A provider who answers every line directly will be easy to work with later; one who deflects four of ten lines will deflect your invoice disputes too.

1. What pages, features, content and revision rounds are included, precisely?
2. Who writes the copy and supplies the images, and what do those pieces separately cost?
3. Do we own the design, code, domain and content outright at the end of the project?
4. What happens after launch: is there a review window, and what do fixes cost after it?
5. What are the real monthly costs once the build invoice is settled?
6. How are backups, security and plugin updates handled once the site is live?
7. What performance budgets are promised against the Core Web Vitals, and how will they be proven?
8. Which person owns my account, and who do I speak to when something breaks in the evening?
9. What handover do I receive: logins, documentation, training and source access?
10. What else are you going to try to sell me, and when?

The bottom line

Whatever number sits on any estimate, test it against the same five questions: is the scope written down, is content accounted for, is performance in the contract, are the monthly costs stated, and does the provider stand behind the work after launch. A small business website done properly costs $1,500 to $5,000, e-commerce runs $4,000 to $15,000, and custom apps start around $15,000, and every figure in that range is defensible when the real work behind it is present.

If you want a straight number for your specific situation, run the sums yourself or send us your page list; the pricing team at KorTechX will tell you exactly what a build would cost before you spend a cent, and you can reach them through our contact page. The best time to set your budget was before you read a single quote; the second-best time is now, with the math you have just worked through in your hands.