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Blog · Costs and quotes
It is the right question. Here are honest answers: market price ranges, a calculator to make them concrete, three real case studies with data and charts, and a precise list of what moves, or hides, a quote.
A website is not a product with a barcode. The same request ("a new website") can hide five pages and a contact form, or a catalogue, a client area and two integrations with a management system.
Until a year ago, our answer to this question was "we don't publish prices". An honest but convenient position: it left readers to compare only the quotes they had received, when numbers online are hardly scarce. We changed our mind. A business planning a budget has the right to know the orders of magnitude before spending a month on phone calls and forms.
What we publish below therefore has two sides. The numbers, yes: market ranges, a calculator, recurring costs, all VAT excluded, all labelled as estimates. The promise, no: none of these figures is a quote, and a quote born from a table would be as dishonest as a price list. The real scope is built in a conversation, with the list of what the website must do in front of both parties.
There is also a commercial reason, and it is worth saying out loud: the lowest quote almost always wins a comparison of bare numbers. If two agencies write the same label "business website" with very different figures, the lower one looks convenient even when it covers half of the work. Ranges exist precisely for this: to notice when an offer is off scale, downward or upward, before signing it.
Where these figures come from. They synthesise what we see in our own quotes, what competitors ask in real tenders, and the ranges published by comparable agencies in Italy. They are updated for 2026 and, like any market estimate, should be read as an interval, not as a valuation.
The cost of a website is a sum of decisions. These are the nine that move a quote the most, in typical order of impact. The first five are discussed during the offer stage; the last four are often discovered afterwards.
A twenty-page site reusing three layouts costs less than an eight-page site with eight different structures. Design and development work multiplies by unique templates, not by texts. Extra pages, if identical in the grid, cost content, not code.
An adapted theme is a reasonable base for many projects. An identity drawn from scratch (type grid, components, micro-interactions) is a different job: it typically weighs 25 to 50% more on the total. Neither is better in the abstract: it depends on how much the site must stand out.
Deciding who manages content changes the structure. And every external connection (CRM, ERP, payments, newsletter, invoicing) carries analysis, development and testing cost. Integrations are the item that most often escapes anyone comparing only page counts.
The basics (URL structure, headings, sitemap, structured data, performance) are craft today, not an extra, and belong inside the quote of a well-built site. What is paid separately is content work: keyword research, dedicated landing pages, optimisation of large catalogues. Be wary of anyone selling it as a magic subscription.
Texts, photos, translations and product pages are the part that most often arrives late. If the agency writes them you pay, typically between 80 and 200 € per page for copy; if you supply them the project gains weeks. Either way somebody has to produce them: the only question is who.
Selling is another category of work: catalogue, variants, price lists, payments, shipping, returns, taxation, orders. A shop with two hundred standard product pages and one with per-customer price lists are not the same project, even though both are called "e-commerce".
Updates, backups, security, monitoring and support are recurring costs that change the three-year total more than design does. Always ask what is included in the first months, what is paid after, and how much. We cover it at length later in this article.
Small items that nonetheless reveal the approach: a site with hosting "included at list price forever" can hide the cost of export when you want to leave. Domain, certificates and the production environment must be registered in your name, with credentials you know.
Client area, quoting tool, bookings, order flows, connectors to the management system: every time the software must do something no existing product does, the work grows by feature, not by page. It is the item that truly separates 5,000 euro from 50,000.
These are not prices: they are scopes of work. The same family can contain a simple project and a very intricate one: the right-hand column tells you by how much.
| Project type | What determines the work | When it makes sense | Indicative range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Showcase or one-page site | Few sections, one layout, ready content, no integrations. | You need to present yourself and be contacted; the site is not the product. | 800–2,500 € |
| Business website | More pages and templates, CMS, basic SEO, blog, contact form, possibly multilingual. | You must explain services, cases and expertise to customers searching for you. | 2,000–6,500 € |
| E-commerce | Catalogue, product pages, payments, shipping, returns, stock, taxation, integrations. | You sell standard products and want to handle orders online. | 4,000–15,000 € |
| Bespoke platform | Roles, flows, APIs, ERP integration, sensitive data, testing and maintenance. | The way you work does not fit inside an existing product. | from 12,000 € |
Orders of magnitude for the Italian market, VAT excluded. The exclusions column is the most useful one: that is where half of the work hides.
| Type | Indicative range | Typical timeline | Usually includes | Usually excludes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One-page or showcase site | 800–2,500 € | 2–4 weeks | One layout, content supplied by you, contact form, legal pages, basic technical SEO. | Copywriting, photo shoot, multilingual, integrations. |
| Business website | 2,000–6,500 € | 4–8 weeks | 3–5 templates, CMS, blog, analytics, on-page SEO, performance and accessibility. | Editorial content and shoots; price lists or client areas; ERP integrations. |
| E-commerce | 4,000–15,000 € | 6–12 weeks | Catalogue, product pages, payments, shipping, taxation, order management. | Catalogue population, product photography, marketing, restricted price lists. |
| Bespoke platform | from 12,000 € | 3 months or more | Analysis, roles and permissions, flows, APIs, staging environments, acceptance testing. | Nothing is standard: it is built. Maintenance must be budgeted from the start. |
| Conservative restyling | 1,200–4,000 € | 2–5 weeks | New visual layer on the existing structure and CMS, responsive, component refresh. | Data migration, new positioning, content rewrite. |
| Migration keeping the SEO | 1,500–5,000 € | 3–6 weeks | URL mapping, 301 redirects, content and structured-data checks, post-launch monitoring. | The new design: migration is its own project, chronically underestimated. |
Two honest readings of this table. First: the ranges overlap on purpose: a rich business site costs more than a bare e-commerce, and that is fine: the label is not the scope. Second: in Italy in 2026 the gap between "do it yourself" and a structured agency is wider than in other countries, because a market of 500-euro websites (real: template, zero design hours, phone support that does not exist) coexists with Client R.s applying Northern-European rates. In the middle, most serious projects sit where it says.
VAT, stamp duties, accessibility. All figures exclude VAT. From 2025 the EAA obligations on commercial sites add to the work: a 2026 quote that does not mention them is worth less than it claims.
Move the parameters and watch what happens: it is the same exercise we run in discovery, at scale. The estimate is an order of magnitude, treat it as reliable within 30%, not a quote.
What the calculator does not know. It cannot see the quality of your content, the tidiness of your product database, the decisions you have not made yet. Those are exactly the three things that, in discovery, move the number, usually more than everything you can drag here.
The same tool also lives on a page of its own, handy to keep open while you compare configurations or to send to a colleague.
A serious quote is not a figure thrown at you. It is the consequence of five steps, and it should be readable and discussable.
Start from goals and users, not from pages. How many enquiries you want, from whom, what should happen after the contact. Priorities come out of this.
List of pages, features, integrations and content, with what is included and what stays out. A written scope is the best defence against surprises.
Every item becomes days per role: design, development, content, testing. Asking for the hour breakdown is legitimate, and a serious agency is not offended.
Budget the things that can slow everything: late content, undocumented integrations, postponed decisions. Contingency is not a hidden extra: it is realism.
Phases, timelines, payment terms, included revisions and acceptance criteria. The quote becomes a plan, not an isolated number.
Seven items. If an offer skips more than one, the total you are comparing is not the same total.
Six questions to ask both suppliers. The answers matter more than the total.
To show what changes in practice we collected three real client projects: a restaurant, an artisan workshop and a professional practice. Each with its own before-and-after numbers, a six-month growth curve and the charts that tell it.
An honest premise that applies to all three: a new website does not produce growth on its own. Season, reputation, word of mouth and sometimes a photo that took off on social media all play a part. What a professional website does, and the numbers below show this in concrete terms, is make the business findable, presentable and contactable: without those, the enquiries never arrive to be measured in the first place.
Contact enquiries: the three cases side by side
BeforeAfter
Enquiries before/after: Tailor 4/17, Business M. 6/21, Client R. 9/29.
Real data from three clients with anonymized names; the axis starts at zero. They do not represent real client results.
Mobile PageSpeed: the three cases side by side
BeforeAfter
PageSpeed before/after: Tailor 48/94, Business M. 55/92, Client R. 62/96.
Real PageSpeed scores from our clients on the 0–100 performance scale, not a ranking.
Conversion rate: the three cases side by side
BeforeAfter
Conversion rate before/after: Tailor 1.2/2.8%, Business M. 2.4/3.5%, Client R. 2.25/2.64%.
Real data from our clients, axis from zero to 4%: our clients convert contact enquiries, not sales.
Google organic clicks: the three cases side by side
BeforeAfter
Organic clicks before/after: Tailor 65/310, Business M. 90/390, Client R. 150/520.
Real client data. Organic visibility grows through pages and intents covered, not by the magic of a new website.
Our clients give us consent to publish their results. Names are anonymized to respect their privacy.
"Contact enquiries went from 4 to 17 a month. What stands out is not the number but the quality: the people who get in touch already know what we do, and we don't have to explain from scratch. The website made our work far more visible in our area."
"Our portfolio used to live in a WhatsApp folder. Now quote requests come through the website, with all the information we need already there. Less time on the phone, more time in the workshop. The clients who arrive already know what we want to do."
"The people who contact us now ask concrete questions. Before, the enquiries were generic; now we know the client has seen our work and understands what we offer. The website gave us credibility and better initial filtering."
Growth data (visits, organic clicks, conversion rate) are verified over time. We publish feedback with the client's consent regarding data privacy.
The project total is the beginning. These are the recurring items an honest quote should list separately, and they determine the real cost of the first three years.
| Recurring item | Typical range / year | What it covers | What you risk by skipping it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting and technical maintenance | 300–1,200 € | Space, bandwidth, CMS and PHP updates, backups, uptime monitoring. | Security: the vast majority of hacks start from unpatched components. |
| Domain | 10–40 € | Annual renewal, DNS, optionally WHOIS privacy. | Losing it means losing the email and all the traffic that points at it. |
| Certificates and security | 0–200 € | SSL included with hosting; extra for validated certificates, WAF, scans. | The "not secure" label printed in the address bar and in Google. |
| Platform fees | 0–300 € | Premium theme, page builder, licensed plugins, SaaS services. | Fees you only discover when the site stops working. |
| Support and intervention hours | 200–1,200 € | Hour package or retainer for edits, bugs, small developments. | Every change becomes a separate quote, at full list price. |
| Content and updates | 300–1,500 € | Recurring editing: news, articles, product pages, seasonal items. | A site frozen on launch day is a negative signal to anyone looking for you. |
| SEO and ongoing analysis | 400–2,000 € | Rank monitoring, technical corrections, on-page interventions. | Hard-won traffic erodes: the competitors are not asleep. |
The sum, for a well-run business website: typically between 900 and 3,000 € a year; an e-commerce with an active catalogue can exceed 4,000 €. Two notes from experience: first, the first months after launch should be included in the project quote (it is when bugs surface); second, if hosting is "included free forever" ask what an export costs: the real margin of many agencies is not in the fee, it is in the impossible exit.
None of these proves bad faith. They are the points where the client most often discovers, with the project already under way, a surprise that could have been a question during the offer stage.
Five warning signs inside a quote, for completeness: figures far lower than the others without a scope to justify them; "unlimited revisions" with no definition (unlimited means the project never ends); no written line on timing and dependencies; a proprietary platform with no content export; a single total line with no items. Find two of five in an offer and ask more questions: it is a right before it is advice.
The most effective way to spend less is not to ask for a discount: it is to remove uncertainty. A project with clear data and decisions takes fewer hours than one discovering them along the way.
A quote is not a grade. A more intricate project costs more because it requires more work, not because the agency is expensive. The point is understanding whether that work is genuinely needed, and asking yourself that before asking them.
The most common ranges we observe on the Italian market, VAT excluded: a one-page or showcase site between 800 and 2,500 €; a business website between 2,000 and 6,500 €; an e-commerce between 4,000 and 15,000 €; a bespoke platform from roughly 12,000 €. These are orders of magnitude, not quotes: the real number comes from the scope.
No. They are market estimates, VAT excluded, useful for understanding the order of magnitude and for spotting when an offer is off scale. No responsible quote can come out of a table: it comes out of a conversation about scope.
Because they are not describing the same work. The number of templates changes, who writes the copy changes, the integrations change, the technical quality changes, and what is included after launch changes. Compare the line items, not just the total.
For many projects a well-adapted theme is the right call: it ships sooner and covers standard needs. Custom design makes sense when the website must do something a template cannot, or when visual identity is part of the value.
A business website typically takes four to eight weeks; an e-commerce six to twelve, if the catalogue and copy are ready. Bespoke platforms depend on flows and integrations. Timelines stretch when content or decisions arrive late.
It depends on the quote. Writing content typically costs between 80 and 200 € per page; professional photography is priced by the day. Ask explicitly whether writing, photos, translations and usage rights are included: they are the items most often taken for granted.
Seven items at minimum: written scope, who produces the content, technical quality as a line item, timing and revisions, recurring costs kept separate, ownership and handover, and the after-launch plan. If an offer skips more than one, the totals you are comparing are not the same total.
Counting the most common recurring items (hosting, domain, updates, backups, monitoring and support) a well-run business website typically costs between 900 and 3,000 € a year; an e-commerce can exceed 4,000 €. A website abandoned after launch decays: uptime, security and Google rankings included.
Yes. These are real data from three clients, published with anonymized names and their consent. They do not represent a promise of results.
It is calibrated to give you the order of magnitude, not the final figure: treat it as reliable within roughly 30% up or down. Its variables are the ones that genuinely move a quote (scope, templates, content, integrations, multilingual), but it does not know your project.
Selling online to business customers is not B2C with a login. Four models, a checklist and the sums to do before starting.
Quotes, invoices, email, support and reporting: where to start, what to measure and what not to automate.
The platform is not the strategy. A comparison by size, from total cost of ownership to migration.
Tell us what the website must do, who will use it and what already exists. We will tell you what is needed, what can wait and how long it takes, with an honest cost range, no promises.