Ask five different web agencies what a website costs and you'll get five different numbers - which isn't much help if you're trying to budget for one. Here's the honest breakdown, without a “starting from $499” number designed to get you on the phone before the real conversation happens.

A simple brochure-style site - a handful of pages, a clear structure, nothing fancy - typically sits in the low thousands. Add e-commerce, and you're paying for the extra complexity of stock, pricing and order management actually working properly, not just looking like they do. A big product catalogue, like the kind we built for Ecoquip, costs more again, mostly because there's simply more to build and get right.

What actually moves the number isn't the page count, it's how much of the site needs to be genuinely custom versus how much can come from a solid, flexible foundation. A site built around a content management system you can actually use yourself costs less to maintain long-term than a cheap build that needs a developer every time you want to change a sentence.

The cheapest option up front - a DIY builder or an offshore freelancer working from a template - often ends up the most expensive option over two or three years, once you count the time spent fighting the platform or the hours paying someone else to fix what wasn't built properly the first time.

If you want a straight number instead of a range, that's what a conversation is for. Tell us what the site actually needs to do and we'll tell you what that costs, not what sounds good in an ad.