How Much a Website Costs, With Actual Numbers
If you have asked three shops to quote a website, you know how it goes: one says US$300, another US$1,500, the third US$6,000. All three write "responsive corporate website, SEO optimised". None of them explains why there is a twentyfold gap between the first and the last.
This is the article we wish existed on the buyer's side of the table. It includes our own prices, which is the part almost no agency publishes.
Our numbers, up front
We are a two-person team in Argentina. We charge per project, not per hour: the number is settled before we write the first line and it does not change if the work takes us longer than expected. That risk is ours, not yours.
- Minimum: US$1,000. Below that it does not work for us, and saying so up front saves you a meeting.
- A typical corporate site: US$1,000 to US$3,000, delivered in two weeks.
- Included: CI/CD and deploys configured, performance measured before and after with the report, two weeks of adjustments on what was delivered, three months of maintenance and warranty, and the repository in your name.
If you are used to US or European rates, that range will read as low. It is not a discount and there is no catch: it is what a two-person team in Argentina charges for two weeks of work. What we do not do is graphic design — we commission that separately or work from what you already have. We would rather say so than bill you for something we are going to subcontract anyway.
Why the twentyfold gap exists
Because you are not comparing the same thing, even though all three quotes use the same words. The difference almost never shows on day one. It shows in month three.
The cheapest quote
It is real: someone will build you a site for two or three hundred dollars. We lost a job that way.
What they delivered was a single giant image pasted onto a page. It looked like the design. And it had three problems the client found out about later:
- It loaded slowly, because an image with all the content baked into it weighs far more than the equivalent text.
- Google could not read any of it, because there was no text to read. To a search engine that page is blank. It does not matter how many keywords are inside the image: it cannot see them.
- Changing a price meant exporting the image again and re-uploading it. Every correction depended on the person who made it having time.
It was cheap once, and then it had to be done over. That is the pattern: the lowest quote is rarely cheaper — it is cheaper for now.
The less extreme version of the same problem is the WordPress theme with twelve plugins. It works on day one. The trouble starts when one plugin updates and another stops working, or when somebody has to maintain that for three years.
The most expensive quote
Also not a scam. A studio with a design team, research and several people costs more because there are more people. If you need brand identity from scratch, photography, copywriting and a site, that quote makes sense and we are not the right fit.
What is worth checking is that you are paying for work you actually need. If you already have a logo, photos and copy, a good part of that number is capacity you will not use.
What actually moves the price
Four things, in this order:
Scope. Not "how many pages": how much logic sits behind them. Five pages of text is an afternoon. Five pages where one has a filtered search is a completely different project.
Technical SEO. Metadata, structured data, sitemap, hreflang if the site is multilingual, redirects if you are migrating from a site that already exists. It is real work and it is the difference between Google understanding your site or not. Plenty of quotes say "SEO optimised" and what that means is installing a plugin.
Integrations. Payments, invoicing, bookings, inventory, a supplier's system. Every system that has to talk to the outside is work, and if there is no API on the other side, considerably more work.
Design. Whether it has to be commissioned from scratch or there is an existing identity to apply. It is the variable that moves the number most and the one least discussed when asking for a quote.
How to compare three quotes that all say the same thing
This works with us and with anyone else. Short questions, and the answers are telling.
1. "Can you send me the Lighthouse score of the last site you delivered?" Lighthouse is Google's measurement tool, it is free and it runs in the browser. Anyone doing this well answers in a minute, because they already have it. If you get a runaround, that is your answer.
2. "Will the content be text or images?" It sounds basic. It is the difference between Google being able to read your site or not.
3. "If I want to change a price or a photo, what do I have to do?" The possible answers are: you edit it yourself in a panel, you email us and we do it, or someone has to remake a file. The third one is a red flag.
4. "Who owns the code when we are done?" It should be you, in a repository in your name. If you want to continue with another team tomorrow, nothing should stop you.
5. "What happens if something breaks in two months?" There should be a concrete answer — a warranty period, a maintenance window — not "just give us a shout".
6. "What will I pay for hosting per month?" It varies enormously depending on how the site is built, and it is a cost you will pay every month for years. Worth asking before, not after.
When you should not spend this money
A few cases where the honest answer is not yet:
- If you do not know what you want the site to achieve. A site built to win clients is not the same as one built to present a brand or one built to sell online. Everything else follows from that, including how much is worth investing. If the answer is "because you have to have one", wait.
- If what you need is a system, not a site. When the operation lives in spreadsheets and the real problem is that there is nowhere to enter the data, a marketing site does not solve it. That is a different project and a different budget.
- If the current site works. Rebuilding something functional because "it looks dated" is the most expensive way to solve no problem at all. Measure it first: if it loads fast and Google finds it, spend the money somewhere else.
In short
The price is not the number: it is what you get for the number. A US$300 site that has to be rebuilt in six months cost US$300 plus the rebuild, plus the six months it did not work.
We start at US$1,000 and a typical corporate site lands between US$1,000 and US$3,000, in two weeks. If your budget is smaller, someone will take it, and now you know what to ask them. If it is considerably larger, you probably need a studio with a design team — and that is fine too.
Want a number for your case? Tell us what you need and we will tell you how much and how long. If we are not the right fit, we will tell you that too.