What Does a Custom Website Actually Cost?
Website quotes come back thousands of pounds apart with no explanation of why. Here is what actually drives the number, and how to work out which one you need.
Ask three people what a website costs and you will get three answers an order of magnitude apart. One says a few hundred. One says several thousand. One says it depends, which is true and completely useless on its own.
The number is not arbitrary. It moves with a handful of specific things, and once you can see them you can work out roughly where you sit before anyone quotes you. That is the point of this piece: not a price list, but the ability to read a quote and know what you are looking at.
What you are actually buying
Nearly every disagreement about website cost comes from people pricing different things while using the same word.
A website is up to four separate jobs, and a quote may include all of them or one.
Design — how it looks and how someone moves through it. Content — the actual words, and photographs that are not stock. Build — turning that into a working site. Everything afterwards — hosting, updates, backups, security, someone to call when the contact form stops sending.
The cheapest quotes are usually build only, on the assumption you will hand over finished words and images. The expensive ones include the writing, which is often the real work. If you have ever wondered why one quote is four times another, this is where to look first, and it is a fair question to ask outright.
The five things that move the number
How many pages. Not linearly — the first five are the expensive ones because that is where the design gets decided. Pages six through twenty are variations on a pattern. A twelve-page site does not cost twice a six-page site.
Whether the words exist. Writing is the most commonly underestimated line in any quote. If you supply finished copy, you save real money. If you do not, someone is interviewing you, drafting, and revising, and that is days of work rather than hours.
Whether it sells anything. The moment a site takes payment it acquires a shopping basket, a checkout, tax handling, delivery rules, order emails and a support burden. Ecommerce is not a page type; it is a different project.
What it has to talk to. A brochure site that stands alone is straightforward. A site that connects to your booking system, your accounting software, or your stock is doing integration work, and integration is where estimates go wrong, because the other system gets a vote.
How custom the design is. A site built on an existing theme with your brand applied is a fundamentally different exercise from one designed from a blank page. Both are legitimate. Only one is cheap.
The rough shape of the market
Without inventing precise figures, the landscape sorts into four bands, and knowing which one you are shopping in matters more than any specific number.
Do it yourself. A subscription and your own weekends. Genuinely fine for a simple presence, and the real cost is your time and the ceiling you eventually hit.
AI-built. Describe the business, get a working site in minutes, then adjust it. New enough that people are still sceptical, cheap enough to be worth trying before you commission anything, and the honest fit is a straightforward site that needs to exist and look right rather than a bespoke one.
A freelancer. One person, usually theme-based, usually the best value for a small business that knows what it wants. The risk is not quality; it is availability in eighteen months.
An agency or a custom build. Designed rather than assembled, with strategy, copywriting and integrations. This is where quotes climb into the thousands, and where they should be itemised so you can see what you are paying for.
Most small businesses shopping in the fourth band actually need the second or third. That is not a criticism of agencies — it is that the brief is usually smaller than the anxiety about the brief.
The questions that make a quote readable
Before comparing two numbers, make them describe the same thing.
- Does this include the writing, or am I supplying it?
- Who owns the site afterwards, and can I take it elsewhere?
- What happens after launch — is hosting included, are updates, and for how long?
- What does a change cost once it is live?
- Is this a fixed price or an estimate, and what makes it move?
That third and fourth question catch most of the unpleasant surprises. A site you cannot edit without paying someone is a subscription wearing a project's clothing, and you should know that going in rather than a year later.
Where we sit, honestly
We build sites two ways, and they answer different budgets.
Faber is the AI route: describe the business and it builds a real WordPress site, on your own domain, with hosting, SSL and mail configured underneath. You edit it by asking rather than learning a page builder. It is a genuine WordPress site — you can export every page from the admin and take it anywhere, which is the part we would want to know in your position. It is labelled beta because it is young, not because it is hypothetical, and you can try it free before deciding anything. If your site is straightforward and needs to exist properly rather than win an award, start here.
For anything genuinely bespoke, we quote it. Not out of coyness — because the five factors above vary so widely that a published number would be wrong for nearly everyone who read it. Ask us, and you get a scoped price rather than a range.
And underneath either one, hosting starts at $10 a month and renews at the same price, with SSL, daily backups and migration included. That matters for this article specifically: the cost of a website is not just the build. It is the build plus every month afterwards, and the monthly part is the half that people forget to compare.
One thing to do before you commission anything: write down how many pages you need, whether you have the words, and whether it has to sell or connect to anything. Three answers, five minutes. Every quote you receive afterwards will make sense.