What actually drives the cost of a website

The first question most people ask me is how much a website costs. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends. But "it depends" is a lazy answer on its own, so here is what it actually depends on. Once you know the levers, you can decide which ones matter for you and which ones you can leave alone.

Pages are the least important number

People often count pages and expect the price to follow. It does not, or at least not much. Ten pages that share one template cost barely more than three. What costs money is the number of different layouts, the number of components that have to be designed and built from scratch, and the number of states each of those components can be in. A pricing table with monthly and yearly toggles, four tiers and a comparison grid is one "page" and a week of work.

So when you describe your site, think in sections and components, not pages. A home page with eight distinct sections is a bigger job than six pages that all look like a blog post.

Content is where projects slow down

The single biggest cause of delay on a website project is content that is not ready. Copy, photography, case studies, logos from partners, legal text. Design can start without it, but it cannot finish without it, and development cannot be tested with placeholder text that is half the length of the real thing.

If you have content ready, say so. It makes the project cheaper because it removes rounds of rework. If you do not, budget for it, either as writing and photography from me or as time on your side. Either way, treat content as part of the project and not something that will sort itself out later.

Motion and interaction

A site can be built with no animation at all, with a light layer of reveals and hover states, or with a scroll experience that carries the story. Each step up is real work. The light layer is almost always worth it, because it makes a site feel finished. The full experience is worth it when the product is visual and the first impression is the whole point, for example a launch, a studio, a hardware product.

What you should avoid is motion that is added at the end to "make it pop". Motion that is planned from the start costs less and looks better, because it is built into the structure of the page rather than bolted on.

Integrations and the long tail

Forms, newsletters, CRM connections, booking tools, payment, authentication, a CMS your team can use. Each of these is small on its own and significant together. The ones that cost the most are the ones that have to be reliable: payments, logins, anything that moves data between systems. The ones that cost the least are the ones with good hosted services behind them.

Tell me which systems you already use. Connecting to something that exists is usually cheap. Replacing something that exists is where the budget goes.

Who is making decisions

This one is rarely on a quote but it shapes every project. One decision maker who reviews weekly keeps a project on its timeline. A committee that reviews monthly doubles it. I do not charge more for the committee, but the project takes longer, and time has a cost on your side too.

The cheapest website is the one you only have to build once.

How to use this

Before you ask anyone for a quote, write down the sections you need, what content you already have, how much motion you want, and which systems the site has to talk to. That page of notes is the brief. It lets a studio give you a real number instead of a range, and it lets you compare quotes fairly, because everyone is pricing the same thing.

If writing that page feels hard, my Brief builder in the Lab does it with you. Describe the project in plain words and it structures the rest, including the questions you have not answered yet.