How Much Does a Website Cost in 2026? A No-Surprises Pricing Guide

"How much does a website cost?" is hard to answer with a single number. Ask for three quotes and you might get €500, €2,500 and €9,000 for what looks like the same job. None of them is necessarily overcharging or underselling: more often than not, they're simply offering different things.

In this guide we break down what actually drives the price, what people typically spend in Italy, which costs repeat every year, and how to read a quote without nasty surprises.

What drives the price of a website

The cost of a website is almost entirely time: hours of planning, design, development and review. The more you need, the more hours it takes. These are the items that weigh the most:

• Number of pages and sections: a single landing page is not a ten-page site
• Custom design or ready-made theme: a design built for you takes more work than an adapted template
• Copy and photos: cheaper if you provide them; writing, translating or shooting them is extra work
• Languages: every extra language means more content, more review and more structure
• Features: contact form, bookings, members area, blog, e-commerce
• Basic SEO: structure, speed, metadata and sitemap done right from day one

What people spend in Italy: price ranges

The figures below are indicative and cover building a simple business website for a small company. Use them to get your bearings, not as a price list:

If the project isn't a simple business site but something more complex, the numbers change scale: a web app usually starts at a few thousand euros, a mobile app at several thousand and up. If you're not sure which of the three you need, we covered it here:

The costs you pay every year

A quote almost always covers just the build. A live website also has recurring costs: small, but worth budgeting for:

• Domain (e.g. yourname.com): roughly €10–20 per year
• Hosting: from a few tens of euros up to €150 per year for a business site, more for high-traffic sites or e-commerce
• Professional email (info@yourname.com): often separate, a few euros per month per inbox
• Maintenance: updates, backups, small changes. Billed hourly or as a yearly plan

The simple rule: in year one you pay for the build plus the recurring costs; from year two, only the recurring costs. Always ask for them to be listed separately in the quote.

How to read a quote (and when to be wary)

A good quote isn't the cheapest one, it's the one where you understand exactly what you're buying. Before signing, make sure it clearly answers these questions:

• How many pages are included, and how many rounds of revisions?
• Who writes the copy and who provides the images?
• Are the domain and hosting registered in your name? They should be: it's your site
• What happens after launch: who updates the site, and at what cost?
• Will the site be fast and optimized for smartphones and for Google?

A price well below average isn't necessarily a scam, but it usually means something is missing: a barely-tweaked template, no revisions, or costs that reappear later. A much higher price only makes sense if you understand what extra it gets you.

Our prices

We chose to publish our starting prices, because knowing where you start makes everything simpler:

The final price depends on what your project actually needs, and we define it together in a free, no-commitment discovery call. We're a small studio, but we designed, built and launched every product you see on our homepage ourselves: it's the same method we use for client projects.