Ask most agencies what a website costs and you get a contact form. We publish our ranges instead. They live in the estimator at /connect, and they are the same numbers we use internally when we scope web development work.
We have launched more than 40 sites. The ranges below hold across nearly all of them, and the reasons a project lands high or low in a range are consistent enough to write down.
The four tiers
| Type of site | Range |
|---|---|
| Brochure or simple site | $3,000 to $8,000 |
| Business site | $8,000 to $25,000 |
| E-commerce | $20,000 to $75,000 |
| Custom or enterprise | $40,000 to $100,000 |
A brochure site describes a business and gives people a way to reach it. Five or ten pages, one content type, a form that sends an email.
A business site adds structure. Service sections with their own templates, a resource library, forms that route to different people depending on what the visitor picked, a content model that staff can edit without opening a support ticket. Most of the extra cost here is design and content modeling.
E-commerce is where integrations start to dominate. A catalog, payments, tax, shipping, inventory sync. Each of those is a system with its own edge cases, and edge cases are where hours go. A store with 40 products and one shipping rule sits near the bottom of the range. A store carrying product variants and subscription billing, syncing to a warehouse system, sits near the top.
Custom and enterprise work is where the site stops being a site. Accounts, permissions, dashboards, data moving in both directions between the site and systems the client already runs. At this tier we are writing an application that happens to have marketing pages attached.
Page count is the wrong first question
Clients almost always open with a page count. It is the weakest predictor on the list. A 40-page site built from three templates and one content type can cost less than a six-page site with a custom checkout.
What moves a project between tiers is features, integrations, and content work.
Custom design versus template. A template is a known quantity with a known ceiling. Custom design means wireframes, then a design system, then front-end work to build what the system describes. Every screen that has no template behind it is drawn twice, once in design and once in code.
Integrations. Every external system is a contract you do not control: a CRM, an email platform, a payment processor, a booking tool. Budget for the second and third round of fixes after each one goes live, because the first version always meets the happy path and nothing else.
Migrations. Moving a few hundred posts off an old CMS with inconsistent formatting takes longer than anyone expects, because it sounds like copying. Redirect maps for old URLs are part of that work, and skipping them costs traffic.
Content. Someone has to write the pages. If that someone is us, it sits in the scope and the price. If it is the client, the timeline depends on their availability, and timelines cost money.
SEO foundations. On our builds these go in from the first commit: URL structure, metadata, structured data, sitemaps, performance budgets. Adding them after launch costs more than building them in, and in the gap you lose the rankings you would have been earning.
The three multipliers
The tier gives you a range. Three factors decide where inside it you land, and one of them can push you past the top.
| Factor | Effect on price |
|---|---|
| Straightforward scope | about 0.8x |
| Enterprise complexity | up to 1.75x |
| Rush timeline | up to +75% |
| Bundling multiple services | 10% discount |
Complexity. A straightforward scope runs about 0.8x. Enterprise complexity runs up to 1.75x. Complexity here means the number of systems that have to agree with each other, plus the number of people who have to sign off. A site with one stakeholder and no integrations is cheap to build for reasons that have nothing to do with the code.
Rush. A compressed timeline adds up to 75 percent. That premium pays for overtime and for the other client work we push back to make room. If your date is fixed and immovable, tell us in the first call; a rush priced at the start is cheaper than a rush discovered in week six.
Bundling. Projects that cover more than one of our digital services earn a 10 percent discount. The saving exists because the overhead is shared: one discovery process, one set of brand decisions, one project manager across the whole thing.
How to use these numbers
Take the tier that matches what you are building, apply the multiplier that matches your situation, and you have a budget line you can defend to whoever approves it. A services business with 15 pages and a CRM connection sits in the middle of the business tier. A store replatforming from Shopify with 2,000 SKUs sits in the upper half of the e-commerce tier before any multiplier.
If a quote comes in far below the bottom of a tier, find out what was left out. The answer is usually content work, or the migration, or the SEO foundations. Those items do not disappear when they leave the quote; they move to you.
Send us the scope you have, however rough. We will tell you which tier it falls in and where the web development hours actually go. You can start a project whenever the numbers make sense.