How much does a custom website really cost?

Ask five agencies for a website quote and you will get five different numbers, often for what sounds like the same project. That is not the industry being cagey — it is because the same brief hides very different amounts of actual work depending on a handful of specific factors.

The real cost drivers

The biggest lever is the number of genuinely unique templates a site needs — a homepage, a product page and a contact form are cheap; a dozen distinct layouts are not. After that: custom functionality (search, filtering, dashboards, booking systems), third-party integrations, and how much content migration or creation is involved.

Design complexity and the number of revision rounds also matter more than people expect. A tightly scoped brief with reference sites you like moves faster — and cheaper — than an open-ended "surprise us."

Typical ranges by project type

A focused marketing site with a handful of pages sits at the lower end of the range. A business site with a CMS, blog and lead-generation forms costs more, mainly due to the admin/editorial tooling. E-commerce adds catalogue, checkout and payment integration cost on top. Complex platforms, portals or multi-role dashboards are their own category entirely, priced on scope rather than a page count.

For the actual German-market numbers behind those bands: published agency guides put landing pages at €1,500–7,000, small business sites at €3,500–12,000 and corporate sites at €12,000–35,000, on average agency rates around €120 an hour. Small WooCommerce shops start near €3,000 and mid-size ones run €15,000–30,000. Our own Business Website sits well below that band on purpose — the price guide sets the two side by side, package by package.

Any agency worth hiring should be able to give you a realistic range within these bands after a short discovery call, before committing to an exact number.

What inflates a quote after the fact

The most common budget overrun is not bad estimating — it is scope creep: new pages, new features, or a redesign mid-build that were never in the original brief. Content that is not ready when development needs it, late design changes after sign-off, and slow third-party account setup (payment gateways, domain access) all quietly add time and cost too.

How to get an accurate quote fast

Come to the first conversation with a rough sitemap, two or three reference sites you like (and why), and a list of any must-have integrations. That alone removes most of the guesswork an agency has to price around, and gets you a number you can actually trust.

Accessibility is part of the quote now

Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has applied to consumer-facing digital services sold in the EU, e-commerce among them. If your customers are European consumers, an accessible baseline is not a tasteful extra that gets cut when the budget tightens — it is part of what the site has to do, and it belongs in the quote rather than in a panic eighteen months later.

Where it lands on the invoice depends almost entirely on when you ask for it. W3C’s own guidance is that accessibility folded into the normal design and build cycle contributes to cost savings, and that redesigns which include it report lower maintenance costs afterwards. Asked for upfront it is mostly discipline: semantic markup, real contrast, a sane focus order, labelled form fields. Asked for after launch it means reopening templates that are already signed off — the most expensive way to buy anything.

Sources

The agency ranges quoted above come from these independently published German market guides (in German). The accessibility rules and the cost guidance under them are the directive’s own text and W3C’s. Checked August 2026.

• tricks GmbH — Was kostet eine Website von der Agentur? ↗

  Landing pages €1,500–7,000; small business websites €3,500–12,000; average agency rate €120/h; developers €110–150/h in the DACH region.

• ExpertLocal — Was kostet eine Digital-Agentur 2026? ↗

  Corporate websites €12,000–35,000; senior consultants €150–220/h; basic SEO retainers €800–1,800/month.

• Kreativschock — Onlineshop erstellen lassen ↗

  Small WooCommerce shops from around €3,000; mid-size shops €15,000–30,000.

• Directive (EU) 2019/882 — European Accessibility Act ↗

  Applies to consumer-facing products and services placed on the EU market from 28 June 2025.

• W3C WAI — The Business Case for Digital Accessibility ↗

  Accessibility integrated into existing development cycles contributes to cost savings; redesigns that include it show reduced maintenance and service costs.