Ask five agencies what a website costs and you’ll get five numbers spanning an order of magnitude. None of them are lying — they’re answering different questions. Here’s how to ask the right one.
The three questions that actually set the price
1. Who’s doing the thinking? A template customization means the thinking was done once, years ago, for someone else. Custom design means someone studies your business, your customers, and your competitors before drawing a single screen. That research and design time is most of what you’re paying for — typically 40–60% of a project’s hours.
2. How many unique page types? Not pages — page types. A ten-page site with three layouts (home, service, contact) costs far less than a five-page site with five completely different layouts. Each unique layout is designed, built, and tested separately.
3. What has to work, not just look good? Forms, CMS content, search, animations, integrations with your CRM or booking tool — every moving part adds design states (loading, error, empty), development time, and testing.
Realistic ranges in 2026
- Template customization (Webflow/Framer template, your content): $500–$2,000. Fine for validating an idea. You will outgrow it.
- Custom marketing site (5–10 page types, custom design, CMS, animations): $3,000–$15,000 from an independent studio; $20,000–$75,000 from a mid-size agency. The overlap in quality is larger than either group admits — you’re often paying for account managers, not pixels.
- Custom web application (dashboards, user accounts, complex logic): starts around $10,000 and scales with scope. Anyone quoting a flat price before understanding your data model is guessing.
Where quotes get padded
Watch for line items like “discovery workshop” priced separately from design (discovery is design), maintenance retainers you can’t exit, and “SEO setup” as a premium add-on — proper semantic structure, metadata, and performance should be built in, not bolted on.
Where cheap quotes cut corners
Speed and search. A site can look identical in a screenshot and still lose half its visitors to a four-second load time or be invisible to Google because every page shares one title tag. Ask any prospective agency two questions: “What will my Lighthouse scores be?” and “How does each page target a different search intent?” If the answers are vague, so is the work.
How we think about it
At Confidency we scope by page types and moving parts, put performance and SEO in the base price, and ship live sites you can inspect — like US Construction. If you want a real number for your project, tell us what you’re building and we’ll give you a range within a day.