Why the question has no single answer
Asking what a website costs is about as precise as asking what a house costs. The answer depends on how big it is, who moves in, how much groundwork already exists and who does the building. We get this question several times a week, and the honest answer is: somewhere between 500 and 50,000 euros. That helps nobody. So this article is about the decisions that push the number up or down, and how to prepare a request so that competing quotes are actually comparable.
One thing up front: the price of a website is almost never a materials price. You are paying for working hours spent on concept, design, build, testing and handover. Anyone quoting 500 euros for a complete company website is either selling you a template with your logo swapped in, or counting on expensive follow-up orders later.
What actually drives the number
Scope and page structure
Five pages are not one fifth of twenty-five pages, but the difference is real. Every additional page template means design, build, content entry and testing across three screen sizes. What matters is not the number of subpages but the number of distinct page types: home, service page, case study detail, blog article, contact. Twenty service pages sharing one template cost noticeably less than five pages that all need to look different.
How custom the design is
An adapted off-the-shelf theme is finished in a few days. A custom design system with its own type scale, colour logic, component library and defined states for hover, error and loading costs several times that. Either can be the right call. If your brand can afford to look interchangeable, this is where the single largest line item disappears.
Content
The most consistently underestimated item. Text and photography do not appear as a by-product. A professionally written page costs roughly 80 to 250 euros depending on length; a photo day including retouching runs 800 to 1,800 euros. Supplying content yourself does save real money, but only if you actually supply it. The most common reason projects slip is missing copy, not missing code.
Features
A simple contact form is an hour of work. A multi-step enquiry form with file upload, routing logic and compliant data storage is a day. A booking system with calendar sync, cancellation rules and payment integration is two to four weeks. Shops, customer accounts and subscriptions move a project into a different bracket entirely, because payments, tax, returns and support come with them.
Languages, integrations, SEO depth and accessibility
Each additional language typically adds 15 to 30 percent to project cost — not because of the technology, but because of translation, ongoing upkeep and legal texts. Integrations with inventory systems, a CRM or an email tool are rarely standard and need testing against real data. SEO ranges from clean technical foundations, which any serious quote should include, up to keyword research, a content plan and a technical audit as their own budget line. Accessibility is no longer an optional extra; for many providers it is a legal requirement.
Realistic market ranges in Germany for 2026
| Option | Realistic range | What it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Site builder, DIY | 0–500 € plus 40–80 hours of your own time | First visibility, sole traders, testing an idea |
| Freelance landing page | 800–2,000 € | One page, one goal, little content |
| Company site, small agency | 2,500–8,000 € | 5–15 page types, custom design, CMS |
| Shop or web app | 5,000–25,000 € and up | Selling, booking, customer accounts, integrations |
| Large agency | from 15,000 € | Brand process, workshops, multiple locations |
For orientation, since the question comes up anyway: with us a landing page starts at 990 €, a company website at 2,490 €, a shop or web app at 4,990 €. Those are entry prices for clearly scoped projects, not flat rates for everything.
On hourly rates, the German market currently sits around 60 to 95 euros for freelancers, 90 to 140 euros for small agencies and 140 to 220 euros for larger firms. A low hourly rate tells you very little if the same task takes three times as long.
The costs that appear in no quote
- Domain and hosting: 10 to 25 euros a year for the domain, 5 to 60 euros a month for hosting depending on traffic, backups and uptime expectations.
- Maintenance and updates: budget 10 to 20 percent of the build cost per year for security updates, compatibility, backups and uptime checks.
- Licences: web fonts cost 50 to 500 euros one-off, image licences 10 to 80 euros per asset, commercial extensions 50 to 300 euros a year.
- Legal compliance: imprint, privacy policy, consent management. Since June 2025 German accessibility legislation has applied to many B2C providers, including online retail, bookings and financial services. Micro-enterprises are partly exempt, but that assessment is something to confirm rather than assume.
- Later changes: every new page type, every additional language, every feature added after launch is a small project with its own effort.
The most expensive part of a website is rarely the first version. It is everything that happens in the three years after it.
Why the cheapest quote is usually the most expensive one
An example from practice, standing in for several similar cases. A trades business had its site built for 1,200 euros. Fourteen months later the developer was unreachable. The domain sat in his account, so did the licences for the extensions in use, there was no access to the source code, no documentation and no backup newer than six months. The homepage loaded in six seconds and the contact form had been silently failing to deliver messages for weeks without anyone noticing.
The rebuild cost 3,400 euros, plus two months of delay recovering the domain. Total: 4,600 euros for an outcome that would have cost around 3,000 euros done properly the first time. The mistake was not the low price itself, but the fact that handover, access credentials and ownership of the result were never settled. A cheap quote with a clean handover is perfectly fine. A cheap quote without one is a loan you repay later.
Hourly rate or fixed price
| Criterion | Hourly rate | Fixed price |
|---|---|---|
| Suits | unclear scope, ongoing support, iterative work | clearly described project with a defined end |
| Risk sits with | the client | the provider |
| Advantage | flexibility, you pay only for work actually done | budget certainty, one number to plan around |
| Drawback | total is hard to forecast | changes require a written amendment |
A dependable fixed price only exists after a real first conversation. Anyone who gives you a number based on two lines in a contact form has either padded the estimate heavily or will come back for more mid-project. For ongoing support after launch, a retainer of, say, four hours a month is usually more honest than a flat package nobody can verify.
Preparation: how to make quotes comparable
- Page structure as a plain list: which pages are needed, roughly what goes on each?
- Settle content: who writes the copy, who supplies photography, and by when will both exist?
- Split features into "needed at launch" and "can wait". On average this split saves more money than any negotiation.
- Name your dates: is there a fixed deadline such as a trade fair, an opening or a campaign start?
- State a budget range. This is not a weakness in negotiation; it is the only way to receive a proposal cut to your size.
- Take stock: existing domain, credentials, analytics history, current content — what stays, what gets replaced?
Put those six points in a one-page document and send it to three providers, and you get three comparable quotes. Without that document you get three numbers describing three different pieces of work.
How to read a quote
A solid proposal contains at least these six elements:
- Scope of work in concrete units: number of page types, languages, forms and revision rounds.
- Milestones with dates, including what you are obliged to deliver and when.
- Payment schedule: 30 to 50 percent on commissioning with the remainder on acceptance is standard.
- What is explicitly not included. This paragraph is the most important one in the whole document.
- Rights to the result: who owns the code, the design and the access credentials once payment is complete? The answer should be "you".
- Life after launch: handover, training, response times, maintenance costs.
If any of those is missing, you are not holding a calculation, you are holding a number. Ask before you compare. A price gap of 3,000 euros is very often explained entirely by what the cheaper quote leaves out.
If you are at exactly this point and want to know what bracket your project realistically falls into, we will spend half an hour on it, free and without obligation. You come away with a dependable range and an honest view of what could be cut from it.