It is the first question almost every business asks, and most agencies answer it with “it depends”. That is true, but it is not useful on its own. Here is what actually determines the number, and the ranges we work to.
The ranges
There are four common shapes of website, and they cost very different amounts because they do very different work.
A landing page is a single scrolling page: one message, one action. It suits a campaign, a launch or a professional’s profile. Ours are NPR 20,000 to 35,000 and take three to seven days.
A business website is the main case: five to eight pages, a content management system so you can edit it yourself, a blog or news section, and the technical work that makes it fast and findable. Ours are NPR 50,000 to 1,20,000 and take two to three weeks.
An online store adds a product catalogue, cart and checkout, local payments, delivery zones, stock and an order dashboard. That is a great deal more software, which is why ours are NPR 90,000 to 2,50,000 and take three to six weeks.
A booking or web system — appointments, reservations, staff logins, notifications — is quoted individually, because no two are the same. Four to eight weeks is typical.
All of those figures exclude 13% VAT.
What moves the price inside a range
Five things account for most of the variation.
The number of pages and templates. Ten pages that share one layout cost far less than five pages that each need their own design.
Whether money or identity is involved. Payments, customer accounts and staff logins add real engineering and real testing, because the cost of getting them wrong is high.
Whether the content exists. If your text and photographs are ready, the project moves quickly. If they are not, writing and photography are separate work, and the schedule depends on them.
How much is design rather than assembly. A custom design takes longer than adapting an existing structure. It also tends to last longer before it looks dated.
Integrations. Anything that has to talk to another system — a payment provider, a courier, an accounting package — is scoped on its own.
The costs that continue
A website is not a one-off purchase, and any quote that ignores the running costs is incomplete. Budget for:
- The domain, renewed every year.
- Hosting, monthly or yearly, depending on what the site needs.
- Payment provider fees, if you sell online. The providers charge their own setup fee and a percentage of each transaction, paid directly to them.
- Maintenance: updates, backups, security patches and small changes. Either a monthly care plan or ad-hoc work when you need it.
These are ordinary costs of running a business online. The mistake is not paying them; the mistake is not knowing about them until the first renewal notice arrives.
Why a range and not a price
Publishing a single figure would be easier to read and less honest. Two restaurants can ask for “a website” and need work that differs by a factor of three, because one has a menu and a phone number while the other needs online ordering, delivery zones and payment reconciliation.
What we do instead: a consultation to understand the work, then a written proposal that documents the problem, the recommended solution, the scope, the timeline and one fixed price. Once both sides sign it, the price does not move unless the scope does.
Before you compare quotes
When you have two or three proposals in front of you, compare them on more than the number:
- Does the scope say what is not included?
- Are the domain, hosting and logins registered in your name?
- Is there a support period after launch, and how long?
- Who owns the content management system login, and will your team be trained on it?
- Is the price fixed, and what happens when something changes?
A cheaper quote that leaves you unable to edit your own site, or unable to move it elsewhere, is not cheaper.