How much does a website cost in 2026: real prices, no runaround

A website in 2026 costs 800 to 2,500 euro if it is a professional brochure site, 2,500 to 6,000 if it is a custom business site, and from 3,000 up if it is an e-commerce. The price depends on how many pages you need, who writes the copy, and how much the site actually has to do. Not on how "nice" it looks.

I am writing this because it is the first question I get, and the person asking it almost always has two quotes in hand that seem to speak different languages. One asks for 400 euro, the other for 4,000. For the same site, apparently. The truth is that it is not the same site, and here I try to explain why.

The price bands, concretely

These numbers are for a freelance professional or a small studio in Europe. A large agency starts higher, a DIY platform starts lower but with other costs hiding underneath.

The ranges are wide for an honest reason: "brochure site" covers both five pages with your copy already written, and a project where we start from a blank page, write the content, choose the photography, and think hard about how you get found. The second case costs twice the first because it is twice the work.

What drives the number up

A few line items move the price more than everything else combined. Once you know them, you read any quote differently.

• The copy. Write it yourself and you save. Have me write it and it is time, and it is the part that actually brings you clients. A site with throwaway text gets found by nobody.
• Pages and languages. Every extra language is another site to maintain, not a translation dropped in.
• The features. A contact form is included everywhere. Bookings, payments, a members area, a link to your existing system: each one is a piece of software in its own right.
• SEO. A site built to rank on Google is built differently from the structure up. Bolting it on afterwards costs more than designing it in.

Then there is a line almost nobody quotes, and it weighs a lot: speed and technical soundness. A slow site loses visits and rankings. You will not see it in the mockup. You will feel it in the numbers six months later.

Freelance, agency, or DIY

The three routes are not better or worse in the abstract. They fit different situations.

In my experience, for a local business or a small company the sweet spot is almost always the freelance route: you talk to the person actually writing the code, you decide quickly, and the budget ends up in the site instead of in the chain of meetings.

The costs that come back every year

The price of the site is one thing. Then there are the recurring costs, and it is fair to know them up front rather than discover them in January.

• Domain: 10-30 € a year.
• Hosting: 50 to 200 € a year for a normal site, more as traffic grows or for an e-commerce.
• Maintenance: 30 to 100 € a month if you hand it off, or hourly when something needs doing.

A site nobody touches for two years ages: forms break, security warnings pile up, Google pushes it down. Maintenance is not a shakedown. It is the cost of keeping alive a thing that works for you every day.

How to read a serious quote

A quote worth its money tells you three things: what is included, what is not, and what happens after handover. If the "after" is missing, the part that lets you sleep at night is missing.

Be wary of both extremes. Of the price that is too low, because it almost always means a template installed and filled in quickly, with nobody answering when something jams. And of the very high price with no explanation, because a big number has to match big work, and that work should be written down in black and white.

If you have a sense of what you need and want a figure tuned to your case, the services page has a configurator that gives you an estimate in a couple of minutes, before you even write to me. And if the real question is which kind of site fits you, I cover it here: brochure site, e-commerce or landing page.