What a website costs

1. The four ways of paying for a website

Comparing amounts makes no sense until you have compared the natures of the spending. Four routes exist, and they do not buy the same thing.

• The agency — a service against a quote. You buy a bounded project: scoping, mock-ups, integration, acceptance, delivery. The amount is committed once, it is the highest of the four, and it gives access to trades you do not have in-house. What it does not include, unless stated in writing, is what follows.
• The freelancer — the same service, without the structure. Same quote logic, lower rate because there is neither a salesperson nor a project manager to fund. In exchange, one person carries everything: their holidays, their workload and any change of activity become your risk.
• The self-service tool — a subscription, and your time. The monthly spend is modest and predictable. But the tool does nothing on its own: it supplies an editor, and the work remains entire. It is the cheapest route in money and the most expensive in hours.
• Yourself, with no paid tool — free in appearance. There is still hosting, the domain name, and above all the learning. See section 4: it is not free, it is simply billed elsewhere.

A fifth route has opened recently, and it fits into none of the four: the subscription where a team builds the site and then holds it. It changes the question being asked, and that is the subject of section 6.

2. Costing an agency quote, item by item

No reference price exists: a quote is built in hours, and hours can be counted. Rather than an amount nothing corroborates, here is the method — you will get an order of magnitude that is right for your case, and you will know which line to discuss.

• Count the templates, not the pages. A thirty-page site using only four layouts costs far less than an eight-page site where every page differs. It is the number of templates to design and build that sets the workload.
• Add the content, which is a trade of its own. Writing the copy, choosing or producing the photos, writing the headings. Many quotes exclude it on the assumption that the client will supply it — and it is the first item that makes deadlines slip.
• Count each feature separately. A contact form, appointment booking, a client area, online payment, a catalogue: each is a distinct build, with its own acceptance pass and its own error cases.
• Don't forget languages. A second language is not a marginal add-on: it is a second body of content to write, proofread and maintain over time.
• Apply an hourly rate, then a contingency margin. Rates vary widely by market and by structure. A quote with no provision for back-and-forth is a quote that will be exceeded.

Two reading marks, more useful than a price: a quote that does not separate these items is a quote you cannot compare, and a quote that says nothing about what follows is a quote that stops at launch.

3. What is never in the quote

These lines almost never appear at signature, and they are the ones you pay for afterwards, often at an hourly rate.

• Hosting and the domain name — annual costs, small but perpetual, and to be renewed on pain of watching the site disappear.
• Technical updates. A site built on content management software receives security fixes that have to be applied. A site left without updates for two years is not merely out of date: it is vulnerable.
• The changes. Changing a price, adding a team member, publishing a page for a new service. Each is a small intervention, billed hourly or as a fixed fee, and their annual total often exceeds what you imagined.
• Search visibility. A delivered site is not a found site. Visibility work is another service, with its own invoice — that is the subject of our page on what an SEO agency costs.
• Copy that ages. Nobody updates it, because it is nobody's remit. It is free and yet it is what costs the most in lost customers.

Add these lines up over three years before comparing two quotes. The ranking often changes.

4. Doing it yourself: the price is time

"I'll do it myself" is a perfectly defensible cash decision — provided you cost what it actually consumes. The method is the same as for a quote: you count the hours.

• Learning the tool before producing anything usable.
• Writing the copy, which is the longest step and the one most underestimated.
• Finding images whose rights are clear, which rules out most of those found online.
• Checking on a phone, where most visits now happen, and fixing what breaks there.
• Handling the obligations: legal notices, cookie information, terms of sale if there is payment.

Multiply that total by what an hour of your time is worth — not your salary, but what you would have produced instead. For an owner who could have been prospecting, the trade-off frequently reverses. And the calculation does not stop there: those hours come back every time something has to be changed.

5. The heaviest item: abandonment

That is the spending no quote mentions, and by far the largest. A site delivered, then left as it is, loses its value month after month: the information becomes false, search visibility erodes for want of new signals, and the visitor landing on a dated page draws a conclusion about the whole company.

The mechanism is always the same, and it has nothing to do with a lack of will. Launch is experienced as an ending. The budget is spent, attention returns to the business, and there is nobody whose remit is to open the site the following month. Two years later you pay for a redesign — that is, you pay a second time for the build, for the same reason you will pay a third time.

That cost appears nowhere in the accounts. It appears in the quotes you never receive.

6. Paying for what follows, not for delivery

This is where the question changes. If the real spending sits after launch, then what you need to buy is not a build: it is someone whose work continues.

At nullbot, creation is the starting point. You describe the site in conversation; several directions are proposed; you look at the preview and correct by talking. The site can take images, a client area with its accounts, a payment facility, and its own domain name — which you can search for and check from within the tool. Every version is kept, which means you can go back without losing anything.

But that is not what we sell. What we sell is what comes next: a team of agents that takes over the site and keeps it alive. It publishes, corrects, holds the search visibility, answers messages arriving through the form, flags what is broken. You do not ask for another quote to add a page. There is no month when nobody looks after it, because that is exactly the team's remit.

The spending then becomes a monthly subscription, comparable in nature to a tool subscription — but it does not supply an editor for you to fill in yourself: it supplies the work. That is the difference that matters, and it is the one you cannot see at the moment of signing.

7. Week 1, month 3, year 2

The right way to compare two offers is to ask what happens at those three moments.

• Week 1. The site exists, it is live at its address, the required notices are in place, the form arrives somewhere a person reads it. All four routes can do this.
• Month 3. Two prices have changed, a service has been added, fifteen messages have arrived, and three pages describe a service you dropped. The question is no longer "is the site handsome?" but "who made those corrections?". That is where the routes part company.
• Year 2. The software has received fixes, the content has aged a year, competitors have published. Either someone has worked every month, or a redesign is to be budgeted. There is no third outcome.

8. The limits, said plainly

A team of agents does not suit everything, and it is better to know that before paying.

• An original visual identity remains a human trade. If your brand rests on a strong graphic stance, an art director will do better, and that is a budget worth accepting.
• A complex bespoke feature — a line-of-business application reachable from the site, an integration with a particular internal system — falls outside this frame.
• Anything that commits the company stays subject to approval. That is deliberate: we do not want a price published without a human having read it. So it does assume that someone approves, however briefly.
• No visibility result can be promised. Not by an agency, nor by a team of agents. What can be promised is the work done regularly — not a position.

9. Frequently asked questions

Going further

Read next: how the site gets built, step by step, what a mobile app costs, or what an SEO agency costs.