Should you build a $2,000 website or a $500,000 website?
Artem Rudenko
CEO, Founder
The cost of building a website varies significantly. A website could cost as little as $2,000, or as much as $500,000. Believe it or not, either of these price tags can be justified. There are many factors that affect the price — let’s walk through them so you can decide what budget is right for you.
Website scale and goals
Building a small website with just a few static pages is usually cheap and can be done by an average freelancer. However, such a website will not be optimized for page load performance or SEO. Small, simple websites like this are usually built just to “fill the gap” when launching a new company or service. Any website is better than no website, after all.
As you increase the size of a website and add more features to it, the cost increases. Your website may include many pages, to communicate the features and benefits of your product. You’ll likely also want to add interactive features such as contact forms or pricing calculators. You should also invest in the performance of the website, so that things load instantly on a customer’s initial visit. SEO also must be a priority, since having a great website only matters if people actually visit it.
Visual design
Another factor that can drive the cost of building a website is the design. Website templates are cheap and readily available, but they are very hard to customize. Many websites that start with a beautiful template end up looking ugly, once the template has been molded to fit your specific requirements. Even if you start with a template, it may become so cumbersome to use that you end up abandoning the template in favor of a completely custom design.
A custom design delivers the most flexibility, allowing you to shape the design to fit your brand identity and marketing goals. Big companies tend to go this route, so they can weave their overall brand design into the design of the website. While a custom design is a strong option for many reasons, it’s also the most expensive option, as you might expect.
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Development team requirements
A simple website can be built by an average developer, but you’ll need a more advanced team as the size and complexity of the website grows. Of course, a more skilled team will cost more money, though this scaling relationship is not linear.
A relatively inexperienced team is cost efficient for small and simple websites, while a more experienced team will be more cost efficient for larger websites (and produce a better end result). The reason that an experienced team is actually more cost effective for large projects is that advanced teams can achieve a high velocity. A website built by an experienced team is also going to be easier to maintain, reducing the long-term maintenance costs.
Tech stack
A tech stack may seem complicated and not worth the investment of time and money. However, it serves as the foundation for a smooth maintenance cycle. There is no single tech stack that is universally applicable to all website projects. A tech stack should be selected to match the size and requirements of the project. Choosing the wrong tech stack can delay the timeline of a project and artificially increase the cost.
While traditional website development has often centered around server-side technologies like PHP, the industry has been rapidly moving away from these legacy technologies towards full-stack JavaScript frameworks. Full-stack frameworks allow you to use the same programming language and file structure to develop both the backend and frontend functionality of a project. Building a website using the Next.js 
framework and hosting it on Vercel is a popular option.
Hosting
Hosting a website on modern cloud providers such as Vercel or AWS is generally cheap, though the cost can increase for high-traffic websites. It is really the Content Management Service (CMS) that drives most of the ongoing costs. CMS plans will be relatively expensive for medium or large companies where many different people need to update the website’s content.
Final thoughts
There is a wide range of budgets to consider when starting a new website development project. This article has covered the main factors that drive the cost of building and maintaining a website. There are many pros and cons to consider, and it can be a daunting task to find the right balance for your specific project. Please contact us if you’d like to discuss your project and get our advice on the right budget and team to choose.