Ask five studios what a website costs and you'll get five variations of "it depends," followed by a discovery call. The vagueness is not usually a trick. It's that the same three words — "a business website" — describe both a one-page brochure and a booking platform with a database behind it.
So here's the version nobody publishes: what you're actually paying for, at each end of the range.
The $450 end
At the bottom of the range you're buying one page and one decision. The cost is mostly structure and craft, not volume: working out the sequence that gets a cold visitor to act, writing tight enough copy to hold them, and building it so it loads instantly on a phone on mobile data.
What you are not buying is a content system, a blog, twelve pages of SEO surface, or anything with a login. If your business needs those, a landing page will feel cheap for about a month and then start costing you.
The $2,500 middle
The middle tier is where most established businesses land, and the money goes somewhere that surprises people: not the extra pages, but the foundation underneath them. Per-page metadata, structured data, sitemaps, redirects from your old URLs, analytics with real conversion goals, a contact form that validates on both ends and doesn't lose submissions.
None of that is visible in a screenshot. All of it is the difference between a site that ranks and converts and a nice-looking brochure nobody finds.
The $6,000+ end
Above six thousand, you've stopped buying a website and started buying software. Authentication, payments, a database, integrations with systems you already run, and the testing that keeps all of it from breaking when someone changes a price.
The tell is simple: if your site needs to know who's looking at it, or hold state between visits, you're in custom territory. Everything else is marketing pages, however many of them there are.
How to work out which one you need
- Write down the single action you want a visitor to take. If there's genuinely one, a landing page may be enough.
- Count the questions your team answers by phone or email every week. Each one is a page or a section that isn't pulling its weight yet.
- Ask whether anyone needs to log in. That's the line between a website and an application, and it's the line where the price changes shape.
- Be honest about who updates content. Weekly publishing needs a CMS; quarterly edits do not.
The most expensive website is the one you rebuild in eighteen months because it was scoped to the budget instead of the business.
If you're between two tiers, start at the lower one and build the foundation properly. A well-built landing page extends into a full site cleanly. A cheap full site rarely extends into anything.