How Much Does a Website Cost in 2026? Real Freelancer Pricing
A straight breakdown of what websites actually cost in 2026 - template vs freelancer vs agency, hidden costs, and my real fixed prices as a reference point.
"How much does a website cost?" is the first question everyone asks me, and the honest answer is: anywhere from β¬0 to β¬100,000. Which is a useless answer.
Short answer: in 2026 a template site runs roughly β¬500ββ¬1,500, a custom business website from a freelancer β¬1,500ββ¬5,000, and an agency build for the same scope β¬8,000ββ¬25,000. The gap is not code quality β it is how much design, content, and project overhead is included. My own fixed prices start at β¬500 for a landing page and β¬1,500 for a business site.
So let me give you a useful one. I'll break down what actually drives the price, what the realistic ranges look like in 2026 depending on who builds it, and where the costs hide. And because I publish my own prices, I'll use them as a concrete anchor rather than hand-waving.
What actually drives the price
Four things determine most of the cost of any website:
Number of pages and unique layouts. A one-page landing site is a fundamentally different project from a ten-page site with a blog, a services section, and a careers page. Every unique layout is design plus development work.
Custom functionality. Contact forms are trivial. Booking systems, payment flows, user accounts, dashboards, and integrations with your CRM are not. The moment your sentence starts with "and it should automatically..." the price roughly doubles.
Design origin. A tweaked template costs a fraction of a custom design. Custom design is worth it when the website is how you make money; it's a waste when you just need a professional presence.
Content. If you have your copy, photos, and structure ready, you save real money. If the builder has to extract it from you over six weeks of emails, you pay for that time one way or another.
Template vs freelancer vs agency in 2026
DIY with a template builder (β¬0 to β¬500 upfront, β¬150 to β¬500 a year). Wix, Squarespace, Webflow templates, or a WordPress theme. Perfectly fine for testing an idea. You pay in subscription fees forever, you look like everyone else, and the moment you need something the builder doesn't support, you're stuck. I genuinely recommend this to people whose business idea isn't validated yet.
Freelancer (β¬500 to β¬10,000). This is my lane, so take it with that grain of salt. You get one person doing strategy, design, and development - no handoff gaps, no account manager markup. The risk is quality variance: the range spans from someone reselling a β¬40 theme to a senior engineer building you a custom product. Ask to see things they've built that are still live and still working.
Agency (β¬5,000 to β¬50,000+). You're paying for a team, project management, and process. Sometimes that's exactly what you need - large projects with many stakeholders benefit from it. But for a typical small-business site, a meaningful chunk of an agency invoice pays for the people between you and the person writing the code.
The hidden costs nobody quotes
The build price is not the full price. Budget for these:
Hosting. Anywhere from β¬0 to β¬50 a month. A modern Next.js site on Vercel can run at β¬0 to β¬20 a month. Managed WordPress hosting typically runs β¬15 to β¬40.
Maintenance. This is the big one for WordPress sites: plugin updates, security patches, and the occasional "the site broke after an update" emergency. Realistically β¬500 to β¬2,000 a year if you pay someone to handle it. A statically-built custom site has almost none of this - which is a large part of why I build the way I do.
Plugins and SaaS subscriptions. Premium plugins, form tools, email services, booking software. Individually small, collectively β¬300 to β¬1,000 a year on a typical template-based site.
Domain and email. β¬10 to β¬50 a year for the domain, β¬5 to β¬15 a month per mailbox.
When you compare quotes, compare three-year total cost, not the sticker price. A β¬800 template site with β¬1,500 a year in maintenance and subscriptions costs more over three years than a β¬3,000 custom build with near-zero running costs.
My actual prices, as a reference point
I quote fixed prices, published openly, so here they are - use them to sanity-check whatever quotes you're collecting, whether or not you talk to me:
- Landing page: from β¬500, delivered in 1β2 weeks. One conversion-focused page, custom design, mobile-first, SEO-optimised.
- Business website: from β¬1,500. Five to ten custom pages, a CMS so you can edit content yourself, analytics, blog.
- E-commerce or web app: from β¬3,000, typically 4β8 weeks. Custom checkout, Stripe, admin dashboard.
- AI or SaaS platform: from β¬5,000, 6β12 weeks. Accounts, billing, AI agents, the works.
Every project starts with a free design mockup - you see what you're buying before you pay anything. And the price you're quoted is the price you pay; no hourly meter running. Monthly retainers are available if you want ongoing work after launch. Full details are on the pricing page.
Why should you trust that I can deliver at those prices? Because I run my own products at the same standard: DevOpsNess (an engineering publication with 400+ articles), MyHomeStock (an AI inventory app on web and iOS), PDFer (31 PDF tools), QRify, LiveScored, Meter. All live. You can go poke at them right now.
The one-line answer
If you need a number for a budget spreadsheet: a professional custom-built site for a small business in 2026 costs β¬1,500 to β¬5,000 upfront from a good freelancer, roughly double from an agency, and a few hundred euros from a template - plus running costs that vary from nearly nothing to β¬2,000 a year depending on how it's built.
If you want an exact number instead of a range, send me a short description of your project and I'll come back with a fixed quote and a free mockup. Worst case, you get a second data point for free.
Related reading
Common questions
- How much does a simple website cost in 2026?
- A one-page landing site from a freelancer typically runs β¬500-β¬1,500. A multi-page business site with a CMS, contact forms, and SEO groundwork is usually β¬1,500-β¬4,000. Below roughly β¬500 you are buying a template someone filled in, which is a legitimate choice but a different product.
- Why are agency quotes three to five times higher than a freelancer's?
- You are paying for account managers, project managers, sales overhead, and office costs on top of the build. For a straightforward business site that overhead buys you process and continuity rather than a better result. For a large multi-stakeholder project it can be worth it.
- What costs are usually hidden in a website quote?
- Hosting and domain (β¬10-β¬50/month), stock photography or custom design assets, third-party services such as email or booking tools, content writing, and post-launch maintenance. Ask specifically what happens after launch - that is where most surprise invoices come from.
- Is a fixed price better than an hourly rate?
- For a well-defined scope, fixed price puts the estimation risk on the developer instead of you, and you know the number before work starts. Hourly makes sense for open-ended or exploratory work where nobody can honestly scope it up front.
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