Cheap website design — what the lowest quote actually costs you

Cheap website design starts in Europe at a few hundred euros, and it is not a swindle — for that money a working site can be put up. The question is a different one: what does the same site cost after twelve months, once everything the first quote did not cover has been added.

This article is about the economics of cheapness, not the breakdown of what a website costs. What makes two quotes differ several times over we set out separately; what accrues monthly after launch, separately again. Here, one thing: what you actually buy at the lowest price, and how much of the bill is visible at signing.

What a cheap site really costs — three tiers

The market does not have one price, it has three distinct tiers. They differ not in build quality but in how much of the bill is shown up front.

Tier one: the entry package

A one-pager on a ready-made theme, usually with no written scope. It goes up in a few days and looks respectable.

The bill grows because the quote covers filling in a template, not building a site. Outside the scope sit the content, every page beyond the package, every integration and the licences for paid add-ons.

One published Dutch price list prints the whole ladder on a single page — figures excluding 21% BTW:

The €550 headline and the €1,099 five-page package come off the same page of the same list. Which describes your business is the question the headline is designed not to ask — and by the time it is asked, the hidden part of the bill is several times the part that was shown.

None of those items is a supplier's invention. All are needed for the site to do what it was built for — they simply were not in the price you saw first.

Tier two: a template at the market midpoint

Published German price lists put a landing page around €1,500. At that level the scope is usually written down, so the extras are smaller and predictable: content, pages over the limit, licences.

After a year the total is roughly twice the starting figure. This is the tier most small companies land on, and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as they know the second thousand is coming too.

Tier three: designed for the business

The midpoint for a properly planned business site on the same lists is around €4,000. Content, layout and technical configuration are in scope, so after a year essentially only the domain and hosting are added.

The conclusion runs against intuition: the higher the price in the quote, the smaller the gap between it and the bill. Not because dearer suppliers are more honest — because they sell scope rather than template-filling.

Why "from €550" is not a price

Budget price lists quote a figure with "from" in front of it, which is technically honest and practically misleading. "From" means the minimum configuration, which almost nobody orders: five pages, your own copy, no integrations, an unmodified template.

There is one way to find out what that number is worth, and it takes one question: ask for a price for your own case, in three points — how many pages, what content, what happens after the form is submitted. The gap between the answer and the price-list figure is the measure of how far away "from" was.

Worth knowing what such a price list never contains: the cost of running the site. All three tiers above cover the build and the first year of domain and hosting. Technical care, updates and readiness for an outage are a separate layer of the bill, which we set out in full elsewhere — and after a few years it is the largest item, whichever tier you chose.

Why the cheapest quote grows

Three items account for most of the difference, and all three are predictable before signing.

Content — the one item you cannot skip

A template arrives with placeholder text. No European price list we could read publishes a copywriting rate, so there is no number here — but the mechanism is not in doubt: it is a separate line wherever it is itemised, because it is real work. You can write it yourself, paying in time rather than by invoice, which is an honest choice as long as somebody has that time.

Worth noting what this means for tier one: an item outside the scope can cost more than the whole quote.

Scope counted in pages

A quote for "a business site" usually assumes five pages. Beyond the package, the Dutch list above charges €149 for each further page. That is rarely a problem at the start and almost always becomes one in month two, when it turns out every service needs its own page.

Plugin licences — the item invisible in the quote

WordPress is free, but a practical build rarely manages without paid add-ons. What a small company genuinely buys — backups, a fuller SEO plugin, a form with conditional logic, sometimes caching — is a recurring annual cost in renewable licences.

Two things worth knowing in advance, because both surprise people only in year two:

• Licences are annual, not perpetual. An expired licence usually does not switch the plugin off, so the site keeps working and nothing signals a problem. What it does cut off is updates — and it is plugins, not the core, that account for the overwhelming majority of vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem, as Patchstack confirms in its report every year.
• Every add-on is a dependency. The more plugins, the greater the chance a core update breaks something. That is not an argument against plugins — it is the reason technical care costs what it costs.

Integration — the point where cheap stops being enough

A form with logic, bookings, passing a lead to a CRM: each integration is priced as its own piece of work, because the risk sits in the other system's API. Three of them usually push a project into the next tier entirely. This is the real boundary of the subject — only an integration turns a site into a tool, and that is the part the cheapest quote most often lacks.

Three times for the same thing

From our own observation: a company hiring out office equipment ordered a website twice, each time from a budget supplier and each time on WordPress. The problem was not the appearance — neither version handled the thing the company earns from, which is the rental process. It ended in a third order.

We do not know the exact amounts, but the model arithmetic is simple: at a landing-page midpoint of €1,500, three attempts come to around €4,500, while the midpoint for one properly planned business site is €4,000. More was paid than a site that handled the rentals from the start would have cost — and there still was not one.

The cost did not come from the price. It came from buying the wrong thing three times.

What is in scope — cheap versus designed

The difference is not that one is prettier. It is which stages of work happen at all.

The last row matters most, because it is the only one about the time after handover. What that readiness costs and what you pay for in it — set out separately.

Five years on: what the next supplier inherits

From our own observation, no names. A company with several physical showrooms wrote with a simple question: they want to add a shop to a site they have had for a few years. Before answering on price, we looked inside that site.

The content turned out to be a wall of builder markup — hundreds of lines of layout with styling repeated on every tile. Inside it sat a banner carrying a sale percentage. To change that one number, the owner had to edit code. She had full administrator rights throughout: the problem was never access, it was that a cheap build had made the content uneditable by a human being.

The second thing was more serious. Two key commercial plugins had no active licence — one was running on a version five years old. They worked, because an expired licence usually does not switch a plugin off. What it does cut off is security updates — and what that means in practice we set out alongside CMS updates.

The conclusion was not about budget: you cannot safely extend something you cannot update. Five years earlier that company chose the cheaper quote. Today it is paying to build again — and across those years it also paid for hosting, the domain and ad-hoc fixes. The sum of those three is the only honest comparison with the quote it rejected then as expensive.

That is why the first item in such a project is not a new feature but an audit — versions, plugins, theme and backups, ending in one answer: can this be tidied up, or is building again cheaper? If you are at that point, the order of operations and the redirects decide how much visibility survives — we have a separate guide.

Four signs a quote is too cheap

It is not about a low price. It is about a price with no scope — and that can be recognised from the document before it is signed.

1. No transfer of copyright and no access to the code. Without a clause transferring the economic copyright, and without access to the code and the database, the site is hostage to the supplier: you cannot move it and cannot commission changes elsewhere. The only point on this list that cannot be fixed later.

2. No technical specification in the contract. The contract should name what the site stands on: the PHP version, the list of plugins used and whose name their licences are in. Without that you do not know what you are inheriting — and on a handover that turns out to be the most expensive unknown.

3. No acceptance procedure. With no testing stage, the site is handed over on a glance: without checking the form actually sends, and without verification on Safari and iOS, where the differences are largest. The full set of pre-launch checks is in our checklist.

4. Plugins on the supplier's developer licence. Paid add-ons are sometimes plugged in on the agency's licence rather than yours. It works flawlessly until the day the engagement ends — after which updates stop arriving, and the site is left with components that become a larger risk every month.

The full set of questions to ask before signing a contract we have collected separately. How to read the quote itself and compare billing models — here.

Where to save and where not to

Budget is often a real constraint, and then the question is not "cheap or good" but what exactly to cut. Not all savings cost the same later.

Can be cut without consequence:

• The number of pages at launch. Three good pages are worth more than twelve filled with generalities, and adding more later is cheap — provided the scope allows for it.
• Photographs. Your own, taken on a phone in good light, are often better than stock and cost an afternoon. A photo shoot can wait until the site starts producing enquiries.
• Content — on condition you write it yourselves. The most expensive item to commission and the only one genuinely replaceable with your own time, because nobody knows the offer better.
• Effects and animation. There is no cheap version and expensive version — there is with and without, and without usually loads faster.

Never worth cutting:

• The clause on copyright and access to the code. Not a price-list item, a paragraph in the contract. It costs nothing, and its absence costs the whole site.
• SEO configuration during the build. Set during construction it is part of work somebody is doing anyway. Ordered afterwards it is a separate project, priced from scratch.
• Backups. The cheapest item in the whole bill and the only one that decides whether an outage costs an hour or a week.
• Testing before acceptance. Checking that the form arrives and that the site works on a phone is free if somebody asks for it. Discovering it three months later means three months of undelivered enquiries.

The rule that orders the whole list: save on what can be added later, never on what would then have to be rebuilt.

When a cheap site is the right choice

It is not always a trap, and pretending it is would be dishonest. In three situations a cheap builder or a simple one-pager is a fully justified decision rather than a compromise.

You are testing a business hypothesis. You do not yet know whether anybody will ask about this service. The site is there to find out whether a first enquiry arrives — until then, every euro above the minimum is spent on faith. Exactly the logic of an MVP: proof first, investment second.

You need a landing page for an event. The site lives for two weeks and nobody returns to it after the conference. Designing a layout for something that is going to disappear is spending with no return.

You are starting as a sole trader with no budget. The site is there to confirm the business exists and give a contact. The limitations are known in advance and acceptable, and every euro saved has a more urgent use. If the budget is zero, we describe three free routes separately.

A cheap site stops making sense at one specific moment: when it has to handle something — a sales process, bookings, rentals, product configuration. At that point you are buying a tool rather than a site, and the cheapest quote usually does not contain precisely that part.

What to work out before you decide

Market bands tell you where you stand against everyone else — not what your project costs. Price the build in the website cost calculator, and what starts accruing after launch in the maintenance cost calculator. Both update with our price list, so they will not go stale with this text.

If you are considering spreading the payments rather than cutting the scope, the comparison of models is here. And if the saving is to come from hosting — check first what you lose.