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Agency pricing is very secretive, for both good and bad reasons. On our mission to making the Web a better place, we created this tool and a guide to website pricing. It’s the most transparent we could’ve made it. We want it to be helpful for the first-time entrepreneur starting a business at home and a marketing director at a global enterprise. The results cover everything from freelance work and page builders, to bespoke websites for large businesses.
DISCLAIMER The results of this calculator are not quotes or estimates from NerdCow. It’s merely our educated guess on the ballpark cost of web design for your company based on your input, our experience, and industry data.
Below you’ll find a summary of what to expect from websites at different price points.
You have two options at this price point. Both focus on popular page builders and/or off-shelf themes. Getting started on platforms like Wix, Squarespace or WordPress can take as little as a few hours.
First, you can DIY with their intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces. There’s an abundance of first- and third-party tutorials, and you can get started for less than £/$/€ 100, plus a small monthly fee after.
The second option is hiring someone to do it for you. This can be done via services like Fiverr, and prices go from under £/$/€ 100, all the way up to 1,000.
The DIY route heavily depends on your skills but as far as outsourcing is concerned, the functional outcomes around the £/$/€ 1,000 price point can go into a dozen of pages. For ecommerce websites, about 25-50 fully set up products – with the capability for you to add more as you wish.
If you go down to as little as £/$/€ 70, you’ll usually get up to 5 pages and only a handful of plugins.
The website will almost always use a template similar to many other sites but it’s a good starting point for personal projects, side hustles, and to quickly validate a business idea.
At this price point, you still have a myriad of options via services like Fiverr. For prices around the £/$/€ 3,000 mark, you’ll get access to verified Fiverr Pros. This opens up a possibility for a more bespoke site, though still with many characteristics of a template-ish design.
You can also opt to find a freelancer elsewhere, and going up to 5,000 can get you a few weeks of work on a fully bespoke website. There will be limitations, usually around the number of pages, plugins and custom functionality.
You might struggle to get full editability of the website at this level, but it should be satisfying for smaller businesses.
A slightly larger budget allows for more deliverables. Bear in mind that you’re still mostly targeting freelancers and small agencies with that kind of spend. Since you’d be working on fixed-scope projects, prepare to get just that. There’s still no room for flexibility at this point.
Depending on the route you take, you can get more than a dozen pages – though if you opt for a more bespoke solution in the upper range of the budget, prepare to be limited to about 10 pages and 10-15 products. For the most part, suppliers won’t help you with the content at this price point.
While many suppliers will offer revisions, we suggest you lower your expectations in that regard. You’re sacrificing the flexibility to get it done within a set budget. The suppliers will most likely incur additional costs on their end due to unforeseen circumstances already, so pushing to make it “perfect” without compensating for the changes in scope may be considered unethical.
For the same reason, take any deadlines with a pinch of salt. The “unforeseen circumstances” are common and impossible to estimate in software development. Add to it the need to communicate with different third parties (your team, perhaps an external illustrator, etc.) and you’re guaranteed to overrun the deadline.
Going up to 20,000 in budget opens the doors to web agencies and more comprehensive services. Professionals on Fiverr are often building fully bespoke websites at this point, often with help in copywriting and even basic branding. If you can’t justify a website specialist just yet, this price point gives you a decent end-to-end experience.
At this price point, you’re still mostly working with a fixed scope. You can expect a bit more flexibility from agencies and freelancers alike, but just know that it likely comes at an expense to them and be wary to not abuse their kindness.
This budget will almost exclusively give you bespoke solutions. Keep in mind that bespoke design and web development take up more resources. You might still be bound by a limit of about a dozen of pages if your requirements are more sophisticated.
However, if you have a lot of content to show, you can work with freelancers using page builders to push out more content or to create various product types for an ecommerce website.
If you want to work with a website specialist, please account for other expenses in your budget, such as branding, content creation, and illustrations. They will advise you when you first talk to them but at the very least, you’ll be expected to have solid brand guidelines they can work with.
Most websites in the 20,000-50,000 price range will be fully bespoke, unless your business needs a ton of help with content management, i.e. on a larger ecommerce site.
You can expect to get a bespoke content hub for all your lead magnets – PDFs, ebooks, and videos. It’s feasible for it to include a comment section and user account management. This could allow you to lock certain pieces of content behind a login.
The £50,000 website is almost guaranteed to have full editability which will help fast-growing businesses. It also makes multilingual setups much more feasible than on lower budgets, which is great if you operate in multiple countries and most importantly, multiple languages.
While you won’t get “unlimited” integrations and bespoke features, going up to 50,000 will cover most of what you can imagine.
Going over 50,000 means that the project has a high value for your company. This removes the shackles of all the previous price points almost entirely. Depending on the reputation of your agency, websites just over that threshold will be valuable even for some enterprises.
It’s at this point that headless websites become a possibility. They allow you to use a Content Management System you love (i.e. WordPress or Contentful) with cutting-edge technology for the front-end design.
Of course, there’s a huge difference between a 70,000 website and a 200,000 website. When value comes first and price becomes a non-issue, the sky is the limit. From outstanding differences, the 50,000+ website will usually be headless – unless there’s a good reason against that.
You’re likely to get much more involvement from independent user testers at every stage to ensure the deliverables are what they actually need. The process will be more engaging for your team.
At this price point, you’re most likely working with an Agile agency. Their process is a collaboration, rather than a customer-supplier relationship. Frequent stakeholder involvement will allow your team to relay all the necessary feedback and quickly change direction as and when needed.