How Much Does a Website Cost in 2026? (Pricing by Type)

A website in 2026 costs anywhere from €500 to €30,000 or more. A simple brochure site for a local business sits at the low end. A custom ecommerce store or a web app sits at the high end. The honest answer to "how much does a website cost" is a range — and the only thing that narrows it is knowing what kind of site you need and who builds it.

Everyone else opens with "it depends." That's true and useless. Below we make it depend on two things you can actually decide: the type of site and the build method. Once you fix those, the number stops being a mystery.

If you're a funded startup specifically, we wrote a separate deep-dive: how much a startup website actually costs. This post is for the broader case — small businesses, agencies, shops, service providers, and anyone Googling the price before they pick up the phone.

The honest direct answer

Here is the realistic 2026 spread for a customer-facing website, before recurring costs:

• €500–€2,000 — a DIY builder site or a template you set up yourself, or a freelancer dropping a template into place.
• €2,000–€8,000 — a properly designed small-business or marketing site, freelancer or small studio, custom within a sensible system.
• €8,000–€30,000 — a custom-built site or store from a senior team, real design, real engineering, built to last.
• €30,000+ — a custom web app, SaaS product, or large-agency engagement with project management overhead baked in.

What moves the number, in order of impact:

1. Type of site. A five-page brochure and a multi-vendor marketplace are both "websites." They are not the same project, and the price gap between them is 50x or more.

2. Who builds it. A DIY builder, a freelancer, a boutique studio, and a large agency are four different products — not four quality grades of the same thing. Each carries a different price multiplier and a different risk profile.

3. Custom vs. template. A template costs 5–10x less than custom design and build. Sometimes that's the right call. Sometimes it's the constraint that forces a rebuild in a year.

4. Content. Copy, photography, and translation are routinely left out of quotes and quietly account for 30–60% of the real timeline. We'll put numbers on these below.

Cost by website type

This is the table most people actually want. Ranges are for the build only (design + development), in 2026 euros, assuming a competent freelancer or small studio — not a DIY builder and not a large agency. Adjust using the build-method multipliers in the next section.

A few notes the table can't carry:

Simple brochure site. The honest truth: if you genuinely need five pages and a contact form, a DIY builder will do it for the price of a coffee subscription. Paying a studio €3,000 for this is overkill unless the design itself is part of how you win business (a designer, a photographer, an architect — where the site is the portfolio).

Marketing site. This is the most common "real" project. The jump from a brochure isn't page count — it's a CMS your team can actually use, proper SEO foundations (sitemap, structured data, OG images), and a design system that lets you add pages later without paying someone to reverse-engineer your own site.

Ecommerce. The range is brutally wide because "a shop" can mean 20 products on Shopify or a custom-integrated catalogue with ERP sync, B2B pricing tiers, and three payment providers. Most small shops belong on a platform (more on that below). Custom only earns its keep at volume or with unusual requirements.

Web app / SaaS. This is not a website. It's software with a marketing site attached. If your "website" needs user accounts, a database, and logic that changes based on who's logged in, you're in app territory — see the real cost of building an app.

Cost by build method

Same site, four ways to build it, four very different invoices. The multipliers below are relative to the freelancer/studio baseline in the table above.

DIY builder — Wix, Squarespace, Shopify (×0.05–0.3)

You do the work; the platform charges rent. In 2026, Squarespace runs roughly €16–€99/month depending on plan, Wix starts around €17/month (ecommerce kicks in near €29/month), and Shopify's Basic plan is about €29/month on annual billing (€39 month-to-month), with its €5/month Starter tier for the very smallest sellers.

• You get: something live this week, no developer, predictable monthly cost, decent templates.
• You don't get: a unique design, control over performance, or an easy exit. The template's decisions are baked in.
• Right for: validating an idea, a side project, a local business that needs to exist online more than it needs to stand out.

Not sure whether to DIY or hire? We compared the two head-to-head in Wix vs. a web designer. The short version: DIY is cheaper until your time is worth more than the saving.

Template + freelancer (×0.3–0.6)

A freelancer customises a Webflow, Framer, or Shopify template with your brand. In 2026, freelancers in Europe typically bill €50–€90/hour, and a customised template business site lands around €800–€2,500.

• You get: a human who makes it look like yours, faster and cheaper than custom.
• You don't get: originality where it counts, and you inherit the template's structural limits.
• Right for: small businesses with a clear, conventional need and a tight budget.

Custom boutique studio (×1) — the baseline

This is us, and the honest pitch is: you pay for senior judgement, not hours. A small studio with no juniors and no account managers builds custom design on solid engineering, and you talk to the people doing the work. Expect €3,000–€30,000 depending on type — and a single fixed price agreed before we start, not an hourly meter. It's what we do, every project.

• You get: a site built for your business specifically, performance and SEO done properly, and someone who's still around in 18 months.
• You don't get: the rock-bottom price of a template or the army-of-specialists breadth of a large agency.
• Right for: businesses where the site does real work — generates leads, sells, or represents a brand that has to look the part.

Large agency (×2–5)

Big agencies charge €80–€150/hour and up, and the multiplier mostly buys process: account managers, project managers, multiple specialists, and a contract that survives staff turnover.

• You get: scale, breadth, and accountability for very large or very complex projects.
• You don't get: direct access to the builders, or a price that makes sense below a certain project size.
• Right for: enterprises, regulated industries, and projects too big for a small team. We unpacked the trade-off in boutique studio vs. large agency.

The recurring costs nobody quotes

The build is a one-time number. Running a site is a monthly one, and it's where "cheap" quotes get their revenge. Real 2026 figures:

Domain. €10–€20/year for a standard .com or .eu. Premium or short domains: anywhere from €100 to five figures. This one's cheap — just don't let your developer own it. Register it yourself.

Hosting. A static or Next.js/Astro site on Vercel or Netlify runs €0 (hobby) to ~€20/month per seat for Pro, plus usage if you get real traffic. Traditional managed hosting for a CMS site: €10–€50/month. Webflow hosting: €14–€39/month. Heavier apps on AWS/GCP: €50–€300+/month.

Platform / CMS fees. This is the line that surprises people. Headless CMS plans (Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok) run €0 on free tiers up to €100–€300+/month as you add editors and content. Webflow's CMS sits inside its hosting plans. WordPress is "free" but you pay in plugins and maintenance.

SSL. Effectively €0 in 2026 — it's bundled with every serious host and platform. If anyone quotes you a line item for SSL, that's a flag.

Ecommerce transaction fees. The hidden tax on every sale. Payment processing is ~2.9% + €0.30 per transaction as a baseline. On top of that, if you use Shopify but not Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a platform fee of 0.5%–2% per sale. At €100k/year in revenue, a 1% difference is €1,000/year — pick your stack with that in mind.

Plugins / apps. The €5–€30/month items that pile up: a review widget, an email-capture tool, a booking app, an SEO plugin, a backup service. A typical Shopify store runs €30–€200/month in apps. Budget for it; it's not optional in practice.

Maintenance. Dependencies need updating, the CMS needs attention, security patches happen. Budget €100–€500/month for light upkeep, or €800–€2,000/month for active development support. We broke down what's actually in a maintenance retainer — it's not a slush fund.

Add it up: a modest marketing site realistically costs €40–€150/month to run. A real ecommerce store, between platform, apps, and transaction fees, is closer to €100–€500/month plus a percentage of revenue. If a quote ignores all of this, it isn't a full quote.

Why cheap is often the expensive choice

Here's the part most pricing articles won't say plainly: the cheapest build frequently becomes the most expensive site you'll ever own, because of the rebuild trap.

A €500 build that you scrap and rebuild at €6,000 a year later cost you €6,500 — and you lost the SEO history, the indexed pages, and a year of compounding authority along the way. A €5,000 build that serves you for three years cost €5,000. The "cheap" choice was 30% more expensive and bought you less.

We call it the 18-month rule: buy for where your business will be in eighteen months, not where it is today. A site sized for this week's needs gets outgrown right about the time it starts mattering — usually when you're raising money, scaling ads, or finally getting traffic. We go deeper on this in the hidden cost of cheap web development.

This isn't "always spend more." DIY is genuinely the right answer for validation, side projects, and anything with a six-month shelf life. The trap only springs when a customer-facing, revenue-generating asset gets built like a placeholder.

How to set a sensible budget for your situation

Forget industry averages. Budget from your own answers to four questions:

1. What does the site need to do? Inform, generate leads, or sell? A site that has to convert traffic into revenue justifies real investment. A site that just confirms you exist does not.

2. How long does it need to last? Under six months — go cheap, go DIY, don't overthink it. Two-plus years as a working business asset — build it properly the first time.

3. What's the cost of it being bad? If a slow, generic site loses you one €5,000 client a quarter, a €6,000 build pays for itself in four months. The build cost is small next to what a bad site silently costs.

4. Who's providing the content? If you're writing the copy and shooting the photos, you save thousands and add weeks. If you need it done for you, budget €2,000–€6,000 for copywriting and €1,500–€5,000 for photography on top of the build.

A sane process is: pick the type, pick the build method your budget and ambition support, then add the recurring costs before you commit — not after. If you're not sure how to even start the project, we wrote a plain guide to getting a website made, and another on how long a build actually takes.

The studios worth hiring won't quote you blind. Discovery comes before the number — a real scope is the contract, and the price follows from it. Anyone who fires back a figure before understanding what you need is guessing, and you'll pay for the guess later.

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Want a real number for your specific site instead of a range? Start a conversation — tell us the type and the goal, and we'll reply within 48 hours with a scoped quote before any work begins.