1. Why the spread is so wide
A ten-times spread across quotes for one brief sounds like a broken market. It usually is not. It is the predictable result of a brief that did not pin down the things that set the price, so each supplier filled the gaps with their own assumptions and quoted for the project they imagined.
One assumed a theme with your logo dropped in. One assumed a design drawn for your content. One assumed you would supply finished copy and photographs; one assumed they would write them. One included a year of changes; one included none. Every one of those is a legitimate way to build a website, and they cannot cost the same.
A note before the rest: the only prices in this article are our own. We are not going to invent a survey of the Indian market, and you should be wary of anyone who quotes you one without saying where it came from.
2. What you are paying for
Almost every website budget divides into four kinds of work, and being able to name them makes any quote legible:
Design
Deciding what each page contains, in what order, and what it looks like. Either taken from a template or drawn for your content. This is where the widest price gap opens, because the two are not variations on one activity — they are different jobs.
Build
Turning that into working pages: markup, styling, forms, responsive behaviour, testing. Fairly predictable per page, which is why page count is the number everyone asks for first.
Content
Words and pictures. Frequently assigned to the client in a single line of the scope, and then the single most common reason projects run late.
Everything that is not a page
Payments, stock, a CRM, an editing tool, search setup, accessibility, hosting, handover. This category holds nearly all the risk in a project, and it is the category cheap quotes shrink to zero.
3. The five things that move it
Fix these five before you ask anyone for a number, and the quotes you get back will finally be comparable:
- Page countThe single most reliable driver, because every page needs content, layout, review and testing. It is also the easiest number to pin down before anyone quotes.
- Template or builtA theme adjusted to your brand, or a design drawn for your content and built from nothing. This is the largest single fork in the road, and the one least often stated plainly.
- Who does the workOne freelancer between other jobs, a small studio, or an agency with account managers and a margin to cover. The same output can carry very different overheads.
- Backend and integrationsA brochure site that sends an email is a different project from one holding stock, taking payments, or reading a live property or hospital feed. Integrations carry most of the risk in any quote.
- Who supplies the contentIf nobody is writing your copy or preparing your photographs, that work still has to happen — usually late, usually by you, and usually as the reason the project runs over.
If two quotes differ by a factor of ten, at least one of these five was left undefined. Find which, and the gap usually explains itself.
4. What the cheap quote omits
A low number is not a warning sign by itself. It becomes one when the number is low because something was quietly left out. In rough order of how often we see it:
- Content. “Client to provide text and images” is one line in a scope document and several weeks of your team’s time.
- Revisions past a fixed round. Cheap quotes cap them tightly; the cap is where the price gets made back.
- Anything to do with search. Structured data, metadata, a real sitemap — often described as included, rarely specified.
- Performance on a mid-range phone on mobile data, rather than on the builder’s laptop.
- The editing tool. Without one, every text change becomes a paid request for the life of the site.
- Handover. The code, the accounts, the domain, the documentation — who holds them after the invoice is paid.
None of these make a supplier dishonest. They make the quote incomplete, and incomplete quotes are the mechanism by which a ₹15,000 website becomes a ₹60,000 website by launch.
5. Costs that arrive after launch
The build price is the part everyone compares. The ownership cost is the part that decides what the site actually cost you:
- Domain and hostingAn annual and a monthly cost respectively. Small, predictable, and the one pair most people already expect.
- Plugin and theme licencesOn template-based sites these are usually annual renewals. They tend not to appear in the build quote at all.
- Updates and monitoringSomeone applies updates and confirms nothing broke. Either you are paying for it, or it is not happening — and the second is worse.
- ChangesThe real recurring cost for most businesses. It falls close to zero if your team can edit the site, and grows without limit if they cannot.
The last row is the one worth planning around. A site your team can edit has a running cost close to zero; a site they cannot has a running cost that never stops.
6. Our numbers, in full
We publish flat prices rather than ranges, so this article can end with real figures rather than a recommendation to get in touch:
- Business website — ₹20,000Flat price · 1 to 10 pages. A complete website for a business that needs to be found, understood and contacted. No backend — and engineered to the same standards as everything else we build.
- Ecommerce website — ₹35,000Flat price · admin panel included. A storefront with the admin panel your team actually runs it from — stock, orders, payments and shipments in one place, plus control of what the pages say.
Everything charged on top, with its price:
- Extra pages — ₹2,000 per pageThe business website covers ten pages. Anything beyond that is priced per page, at the same rate however many you add.
- Content management on a business website — ₹10,000Adds the tool that lets your team edit the site — text, images and banners — without coming back to us for every change.
- Ecommerce backend dashboard with SEO features — ₹5,000 – ₹10,000A deeper dashboard on top of the standard admin panel, with the search controls for product and category pages. The range depends on how much of it you need.
Start to launch is two to four weeks depending on complexity. All prices on this page exclude GST. GST applies on top at the prevailing rate. The full breakdown, including what sits inside each package, is on the pricing page.
We are not claiming these are the right prices for every supplier in India. They are ours, they are published, and they give you one fixed point to measure other quotes against.
7. Comparing two quotes fairly
Send these six questions to every supplier you are considering. The answers make quotes comparable in a way the totals never do:
- How many pages, and what happens to the price at page eleven?
- Is this a template or built for us? If a template, which one, and what does the licence cost each year?
- What is the total in year two, assuming we change some text every month?
- What are the Core Web Vitals targets, measured on a mid-range phone, and are they in the contract?
- Who owns the code, the domain and the hosting accounts on the day we part ways?
- What is explicitly not included?
The last question is the most useful and the least often asked. A supplier who can tell you plainly what is not included has thought about the project. One who says everything is included has either not read the brief or is planning to discuss it later, when you have already paid a deposit.
Price a website the way you would price anything else you intend to keep: over the years you will own it, with the exclusions in writing, and against a scope specific enough that two suppliers are genuinely quoting for the same thing.