Startup enquiries are more alike than founders expect. Different products, different markets, different stages — and the same ten requests, usually in the same order, often in the first ten minutes. That is not a criticism. Most of these are entirely reasonable things to want. But a request is not a brief, and the gap between what a founder asks for and what they are actually trying to buy is where budgets get spent on the wrong thing. This is the countdown, from ten to one, with the honest answer to each: what it really means, what it costs at our prices, and when the right answer is no. Every number here is our published list price, and every claim outside our own pricing carries a source at the bottom.
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Ten things startups ask a web agency for.
Ranked by how often each one comes up in the first conversation, not by how much it matters. What the request really means, what it honestly costs, and the five things nobody asks for.
How we ranked them
The order is frequency, not importance. Number ten shows up in maybe one enquiry in five; number one shows up in almost all of them, usually before anyone has described what the product does. Ranking by importance would have produced a different and much more flattering list, with strategy at the top and the logo somewhere near the bottom, and it would have been a list about us rather than about what founders actually say.
Every entry answers the same three questions. What is being asked. What the founder is actually trying to buy, which is frequently not the same thing. And the honest answer, including the times that answer is “you do not need this yet”, which is roughly a third of them.
One thing worth saying before the countdown, because it colours the whole list. In CB Insights’ analysis of startup post-mortems, the most-cited cause of death was running out of money at 38%, with no market need close behind at 35%. Nothing on this list beats either of those. A website cannot save a product nobody wants, and an expensive one can absolutely help you run out of cash faster. Every honest answer below is shaped by that.
10. “Can we see a few concepts first?”
The request: three homepage directions, unpaid, so the team can pick one before committing. It sounds like a small ask and it is the single largest one on this list, because a homepage concept is most of the design thinking for the whole site.
What is actually being bought: confidence. The founder has been burned before, or has never commissioned design, and wants proof the agency can do it before money changes hands. That is a legitimate worry with a legitimate answer — it just is not free concepts. Ask instead for work the agency has already shipped in a comparable constraint, and talk to the client. Our portfolio exists for exactly this and every project on it is real.
The honest answer: no agency worth hiring will design three homepages on spec, and the ones that will are recovering the cost from the clients who said yes. What you can buy is a small, real first step. A Landing Page Design is €349 and produces one designed page you own outright — if you hate it, you have lost €349 rather than six weeks. That is a far better test than a free mockup, because the agency is doing the work the way it would actually do it. On whether you need the designs at all before code, do you still need Figma designs before development argues both sides.
9. “Can you make it look like Linear?”
Sometimes Linear, sometimes Stripe, sometimes Vercel, occasionally Apple. Always a company with a design team larger than the entire startup asking. The reference is nearly always a developer-tools or fintech product with a dark palette, enormous whitespace and one gradient.
What is actually being bought: credibility. “Make it look like Linear” means “make us look like a company that has raised money and knows what it is doing.” That is a real goal and a good one. The problem is that the reference is the wrong instrument for it, because those sites are austere as a consequence of having one product, one audience and a team to enforce it. Copy the surface onto a company that has three offers and a services page and it stops reading as confidence and starts reading as a template.
The honest answer: you can have the craft, and you cannot have the constraints for free. The parts that actually transfer are cheap — restraint in the palette, one typeface used properly, real spacing, and content that says one thing per screen. The parts that do not transfer are the ones founders point at: the ten-second hero animation and the WebGL background, which on a startup site mostly cost you the first paint. Which of the current references are worth taking is the whole of web design trends 2026, and what the genuinely successful sites share — which is much less exciting than a gradient — is in what the most popular websites have in common.
8. “Can you do the logo as well?”
Almost always asked as an afterthought, in the last minute of the call, in the same tone as asking whether the price includes VAT. It is rarely an afterthought in practice — a good part of the time the company does not have a logo at all and the website is blocked behind it.
What is actually being bought: usually a logo, genuinely. Sometimes a whole identity, described as a logo because that is the word founders have. The distinction matters because the second one costs more than double and the first one, bought alone, tends to get redone within a year once the company discovers it needs colours, type, and rules for what happens on a dark background.
The honest answer: yes, and pick deliberately. A Logo Package is €299 and gives you a mark and the files. A Brand Starter Kit is €699 and gives you the mark plus the palette, the typography and the rules — which is what stops the site, the deck and the invoice from looking like three companies. At pre-seed the €299 answer is usually correct and the honest reason is that your brand will change when your product does. Once you have paying customers the €699 answer is correct, and buying it twice costs more than buying it once. Logo vs brand identity draws the line properly.
7. “We need it in three languages from day one”
English plus the home market, then German or French because that is where the customers are supposed to be. Asked with total confidence at a stage when the company has not yet sold anything in the first language.
What is actually being bought: reach, or the appearance of it. Sometimes it is real — a Romanian B2B company selling into DACH genuinely needs German, and we have said so on this site more than once. Often it is the founder pre-building for a market they have not tested, and the second language ships, gets no traffic, and quietly goes stale because nobody wants to pay to translate every update.
The honest answer: translation is the cheap part and almost nobody believes it. Machine translation gets you most of the way for a few euros a month; a native reviewer handles the register. The expensive part is everything around it — per-language routing, hreflang, translated metadata, a switcher that lands on the equivalent page rather than the homepage, and a content process that does not let one language rot. That is why a Multilingual Website is €2,399 rather than the price of a translator. Our actual advice at pre-seed is to launch one language and add the second when a real customer asks in it. When you do, SEO architecture for multilingual B2B websites covers the part that goes wrong.
6. “Can we edit everything ourselves?”
The CMS question, and the most reasonable request on the list. Behind it is a specific bad memory: a previous agency that charged for a typo and took four days to change a phone number.
What is actually being bought: independence from us. Which we think you should have — a client who cannot change their own copy is a client who stops updating their site, and a site that stops being updated stops earning. The trap is the word “everything”. Editing text, images, prices, team members and blog posts is a solved problem. Editing layout, adding arbitrary sections and rearranging the page means a page builder, and a page builder is what puts a ceiling on the site later.
The honest answer: buy editable content, not an editable layout. A WordPress Starter is €999 and gives you a site your team can genuinely run. What you give up is the ceiling: in the 2025 Web Almanac, WordPress sites passed Core Web Vitals 45% of the time against 74% for Wix, and that gap is mostly plugins and builders stacking up over the years. If speed is a product requirement rather than a preference, the answer is a built site with defined editable regions instead. WordPress or a headless CMS and custom development vs website builders take the two halves of that trade-off apart.
5. “Can you build the app too?”
Usually arrives as “and eventually a mobile app”, meaning within the quarter. Frequently before the web product has a single active user.
What is actually being bought: seriousness. An app in the stores feels like proof the company is real in a way a website does not, and that feeling is why the request outruns the need so consistently. There are startups whose product genuinely has to be native — anything leaning on the camera, on background location, on offline use, on push as the core loop. There are far more where the app is a wrapper around pages that already work in a browser.
The honest answer: check whether you need the stores before you pay for them. Native means two codebases, an Apple Developer Program membership at $99 a year, a one-time $25 Google Play registration fee, and app review standing between you and every fix you ship — which is the part founders underestimate, because on the web a bug is a twenty-minute deploy and in the stores it is a submission. A PWA Starter is €1,499, installs to the home screen, works offline and updates the moment you push. A native iOS App (SwiftUI) is €4,999 and is the right answer when the platform is genuinely the product. Start with the cheap one and let real usage tell you whether you need the expensive one.
4. “Can you put AI in it?”
Two years ago this was rare and now it is in most enquiries, phrased with varying degrees of specificity. Roughly nine times in ten it means a chatbot on the site.
What is actually being bought: relevance, and occasionally a slide for the next investor deck. That is not automatically a bad reason — if a fundraising narrative needs a demonstrable AI feature, that is a real business requirement even when it is not a user one. It is worth being honest with yourself about which of the two you are buying, because they point at different builds.
The honest answer: name the job first. A chatbot that answers questions your own documents already answer is a good, cheap purchase at FAQ Chatbot €799 — it deflects the same twenty questions all day and the model usage bills to you at a few euros a month. A chatbot bolted onto a site that gets forty visitors a week is decoration with a running cost. And a startup with a repetitive internal process usually gets more from automating that than from anything customer-facing: Workflow Automation at €699 keeps producing while everyone is asleep. AI agents vs chatbots is the distinction worth having before you spend anything.
3. “Will it rank on Google?”
Asked as though it were a build setting. Sometimes phrased as “is it SEO optimised”, which is the version that has been sold to the founder by someone else.
What is actually being bought: customers, without a marketing budget. Organic traffic is the only acquisition channel that looks free at the point of use, which is exactly why every founder wants it and why the timeline is the thing they are never told.
The honest answer: the build determines whether you can rank and does nothing about when. A new domain with twelve pages does not rank for anything competitive in month one, and Google’s own starter guide is explicit that changes can take anywhere from hours to several months to be reflected. Realistically you are looking at half a year before organic is a channel rather than a rounding error, which is the entire subject of SEO after launch: the first 12 months. What a good build actually buys you is that nothing is in the way: clean URLs, real server-rendered content, fast pages, correct metadata, a sitemap that is not lying. A SEO Starter at €499 covers that groundwork. For the gap between launch and traction you buy traffic — Google Ads Setup at €399 — and SEO vs Google Ads: which traffic is cheaper does the arithmetic on when each one wins.
2. “Can it be live before demo day?”
The deadline. Demo day, the close of a round, a trade fair, a product launch, the investor meeting on the 14th. Almost always real, almost always immovable, and almost always attached to a scope that assumes six weeks of work.
What is actually being bought: a date. Not a website — a date. This is the one request on the list where the constraint is genuinely non-negotiable, and treating it as a preference is how agencies produce a beautiful site that arrives eight days after the thing it was for.
The honest answer: the date is fixed, so the scope has to move, and the scope should move deliberately rather than by whatever is unfinished on the day. Cut pages before you cut quality. One page that is genuinely finished — fast, written properly, with a working form — beats a nine-page site with three placeholder sections and a contact form nobody tested, and it beats it in front of exactly the audience you are worried about. A Landing Page at €499 is built for this, and the rest of the site can follow in month two once you know which parts anyone asked about. How long does a website project actually take sets out what genuinely compresses and what does not — and the honest answer there is that your own review cycles are usually the long pole, not our build.
1. “What’s your cheapest option?”
Number one, and by a distance. It arrives before the product has been described about half the time, which tells you it is not really a question about price.
What is actually being bought: risk control. The founder does not know whether this will work, has a fixed and usually small amount of money, and is trying to find the smallest cheque that could possibly be enough. That is not stinginess. It is the correct instinct, and the same instinct that keeps a company alive long enough to find out whether anyone wants the product.
The honest answer, and we will give it against our own interests: the cheapest useful thing is a single page that does one job, and for a startup that has not yet proven demand it is frequently the right purchase. A Landing Page at €499 is one page, real copy, a form that works, fast. It will not carry a company through a Series A and it is not supposed to. A Business Website at €1,999 is the version that does — several pages, structure that can grow, an SEO foundation worth having — and it is the wrong purchase for a company still looking for its first ten customers.
The distinction that actually matters is not cheap versus expensive, it is configured versus developed. Under a certain budget you are buying an assembled site on an existing platform, with the ceiling that implies. Above it you are buying something built, which costs more and does not have that ceiling. Both are legitimate; being sold the first while being charged for the second is not. How much does a custom website really cost and the 2026 price guide put real numbers on both sides, including other agencies’.
Five things startups never ask for, and should
Who writes the content. This is the number one reason projects run late, and it is never in the brief. Design and build finish on schedule, then the site waits five weeks for the About page. Decide at kickoff who writes each page and when it is due, or buy the writing. A site with placeholder text cannot launch, so this is not a detail — it is the critical path.
Measurement, before launch rather than after. Founders ask whether the site will rank and almost never ask how they will know whether it worked. Without analytics in place on day one you have no baseline, so the redesign in month eight is a matter of opinion. Google Analytics 4 Setup is €199 and is the cheapest insurance on this page.
Accessibility. Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has applied to a wide range of products and services sold to consumers in the EU, including e-commerce, with WCAG 2.2 as the practical reference. Building to it costs very little on a new site and is expensive to retrofit onto a finished one. WCAG 2.2 and the European Accessibility Act covers who is actually in scope.
The legal and privacy layer. Terms, privacy policy, cookie handling, and a lawful basis for the data your form collects. Nobody asks about this and everybody needs it, and a consent banner bolted on in month six usually breaks the analytics from the previous point.
What happens after launch. A site is not a delivery, it is a thing that runs — dependencies age, forms silently stop sending, a plugin update takes the checkout down on a Saturday. Monthly Maintenance at €299 exists for this, and what a maintenance retainer should include is worth reading even if you buy it elsewhere.
What a first startup site actually costs
Pre-seed, testing whether anyone wants it: a Landing Page at €499, Google Analytics 4 Setup at €199 and Hosting Setup at €199. That is €897 one-time, plus a domain and a hosting bill of a few euros a month. It is live, it is fast, and it tells you whether anyone cares.
Funded, selling, needs the real thing: a Business Website at €1,999, a Brand Starter Kit at €699 and SEO Starter at €499 — €3,197 one-time, with Monthly Maintenance at €299 a month after that. Add Google Ads Setup at €399 if you need traffic before SEO arrives, which you will.
The number that should worry you is not either of these. It is the €12,000 quote for the first version of a product nobody has bought yet. Spending a seed round’s worth of runway on a website before the first ten customers is the most expensive version of the mistake at the top of this article, and it is one we have talked founders out of more than once.
If you only ask one question
Ask what the smallest version is that would still tell you something. Not the cheapest — the smallest that produces a real signal. Any agency that cannot answer that, or that answers it by describing the largest package, has told you what kind of relationship this is going to be.
The corollary is worth saying too: ask what happens if it does not work. A good answer describes what you would learn and what the next €500 would go on. A bad one is a longer list of features.
If you want that conversation without buying anything first, a Strategy Session is €199 and regularly ends with a shorter recommendation than the founder expected — including, more than once, that the site is not the constraint and the money belongs somewhere else this quarter. If you would rather read first, how to choose a web design agency is the version of this article written from the other side.
Sources
Our own prices are the published list prices on this site, checked September 2026. Everything else is linked to a primary source below — vendor documentation, the standards bodies, or the original research.
- CB Insights — The top reasons startups fail ↗
Analysis of startup post-mortems ranking causes of failure: running out of cash or failing to raise new capital at 38%, and no market need at 35%, ahead of team, competition and pricing problems.
- Web Almanac 2025 — CMS ↗
Real-user Core Web Vitals pass rates by platform across the HTTP Archive crawl: WordPress at 45% against Wix at 74%, with the gap attributed largely to accumulated plugins and page builders rather than the core software.
- Google Search Central — SEO starter guide ↗
Google states that changes to a site can take anywhere from a few hours to several months to be reflected in Search, and that most sites do not need to do anything unusual to be indexed.
- Google Search Central — spam policies ↗
Scaled content abuse is named as a policy violation: producing many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help people, whether generated by automation, by humans, or by both.
- EUR-Lex — Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act ↗
Accessibility requirements for a defined set of products and services, including e-commerce, applying from 28 June 2025, with limited exemptions for microenterprises providing services.
- W3C — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 ↗
The W3C Recommendation used as the practical conformance reference for the Accessibility Act. Level AA is the level cited in EU harmonised standards.
- web.dev — Web Vitals ↗
The Core Web Vitals thresholds a page is measured against: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, at the 75th percentile of real users.
- Apple — Developer Program ↗
Membership of the Apple Developer Program, required to distribute an app on the App Store, at US$99 per year, with app review applying to each submitted version.
- Google Play — developer registration ↗
A one-time US$25 registration fee to create a Google Play developer account, separate from Apple’s annual membership.
- Baymard Institute — cart abandonment rate ↗
A rolling average of documented cart abandonment studies, sitting close to 70%, used here as the reason a shop is a conversion problem before it is a design problem.
- Nielsen Norman Group — how long users stay on web pages ↗
Users leave most web pages within 10 to 20 seconds, with pages that communicate a clear value proposition holding attention measurably longer.
— FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Not sure which of these your startup actually needs?
Tell us the stage you are at and what you are trying to find out. We will tell you the smallest thing worth building — and what to leave until next quarter.