The spread is not negotiation, it is scope. What each band actually contains, the six items that are almost never in the price, and the thirty-six-month total that reshuffles the ranking.
by Nadia Maar ·
It is the first question on every call and the only one nobody answers with a number. Not out of commercial coyness: “a website” is not an object, it is a word covering things that cost ten times one another — and anyone who answers “€3,000” without asking anything is guessing which of the ten you have in mind.
So let's do the opposite of a price list. Take one real brief, the kind that arrives every week — B2B company, a catalogue to show, two languages, product data that today lives in the ERP — and look at the four quotes it gets back. They run from €2,400 to €31,000: thirteen times apart. None of the four is dishonest and none of the four is robbing you: they are answering four different questions, all of them contained in the same line of brief.
Below are the four quotes opened item by item, the six things that appear in none of them and that you will pay for anyway, and the thirty-six-month total — which is the only number that matters, and in which the cheapest quote does not come first.
The price of a site does not depend on how many pages it has. It is the variable everyone asks about first and it is almost irrelevant: forty pages laid out on the same template cost barely more than ten. What actually moves the number is four things, and not one of them appears in the question “what does a website cost”.
A brochure site done properly, your own content and no integrations, runs between €2,000 and €9,000 in Italy. With a catalogue that has to stay aligned to an ERP you move to €15,000-35,000, because you are buying a different thing. Below €1,500 there is no cheaper site: there is the same work moved onto you, and that is the subject of section four.
This is a real brief, sent identically to four different parties. The four answers are the typical shapes of the Italian market: the freelancer with a theme, the small studio, the custom shop, the custom shop with a client area. Tap a quote and read the right-hand column, not the left one.
B2B company, around 40 pages. A catalogue of 300 products to show without a cart: instead of “buy” the button says “request a quote”. Two languages, Italian and English. Product data — codes, prices, stock, spec sheets — today lives in the ERP and the purchasing office keeps it up to date.
| Freelancer with a theme — €2,400 | One person, purchased theme adapted, three weeks. |
| Small studio — €7,900 | Designed layout, one-off import, six weeks. |
| Custom, integrated — €18,000 | Designed and built, nightly ERP sync, twelve weeks. |
| Custom + client area — €31,000 | All of the above, plus the client area with per-customer prices, twenty weeks. |
One person, purchased theme adapted, three weeks.
Designed layout, one-off import, six weeks.
Designed and built, nightly ERP sync, twelve weeks.
All of the above, plus the client area with per-customer prices, twenty weeks.
Read the four right-hand columns in a row and the spread stops being mysterious. Between the first quote and the third the difference is not skill or margin: it is that in the first one your own staff enter three hundred records by hand, forever, and in the third a procedure brings them in overnight. That line appears in neither price, and it is worth the difference between the two prices.
These six are missing from all four quotes in the previous section — including the €31,000 one, where at least they are declared. It is not a trick: they are things the vendor cannot do in your place, or cannot foresee. The trouble starts when they go unnamed, because then they enter the budget afterwards, once the budget is closed.
| The item | Who actually does it | What it weighs |
|---|---|---|
| The copy | You, and always later than planned | It is the number one cause of half-finished sites: design ready, records empty. Written for you, €200-600 per long page; written by you, count six weeks of somebody who already has another job. |
| Photography | You | An honest product shoot runs €800-3,000. The supplier's photos are free and identical to the ones your competitor already has: a legitimate choice, not an invisible saving. |
| Hosting, domain, certificates, licences | Metered, often unwritten | From €200 a year for a brochure site to €1,400 for one with syncs and a client area. Ask for it as a line in the quote, not as a surprise in January. |
| Training | Nobody, unless it is written down | Half a recorded day costs €300-600 and decides whether the site gets updated or still shows the launch news a year later. Best ratio of cost to damage avoided on the list. |
| Maintenance | You, when it breaks | Between 15 and 20% of the build cost, per year. It is not a defensive subscription: it is security updates, things that stop working when an external service changes, and a person you can reach. |
| Your own time | You, and it cannot be quoted | Decisions, reviews, materials. On a three-month project that is 20-40 hours of somebody who matters in the company. It is the cost nobody puts in a quote and the one that explains most delays on its own. |
A site is not bought: it is kept. The build price is between an eighth and a third of what it will have cost you by year three, whichever quote you pick — and it is the only part anyone negotiates, which explains why the negotiation always happens on the wrong part. Here are the first three quotes from section two followed for thirty-six months, with the items from section three inside them.
| Adapted theme | €2,400 | €20,700 |
| Small studio | €7,900 | €17,800 |
| Custom, integrated | €18,000 | €28,800 |
At signing: Adapted theme (€2,400) · Small studio (€7,900) · Custom, integrated (€18,000)
At thirty-six months: Small studio (€17,800) · Adapted theme (€20,700) · Custom, integrated (€28,800)
Around month twenty-four the cheapest quote becomes the second most expensive. Nothing dramatic happened: the hours spent redoing the catalogue by hand have overtaken the €5,500 difference at the start.
That the third quote stays the most expensive of the three even at thirty-six months is true and worth saying: if your site is a brochure that simply has to exist and be found, the first quote is the right answer and spending €18,000 is waste. The total only flips when the site has to do something the other two do not — stay aligned to the ERP on its own, show different prices to different customers, take orders without anyone retyping them — and in that case you are not comparing three sites: you are comparing one against two that do not solve the problem. There the right comparison is not with the other two prices, it is with revenue, and that is another piece.
The €6,100 a year on the first quote is not an invoice: it is four hours a week of somebody in purchasing retyping into the site what they have already typed into the ERP, counted at €25 an hour, plus €900 of hosting and licences. It never leaves the bank account, which is why nobody sees it — but it leaves from somewhere, and it is the reason the “cheap” site is the expensive choice in this table.
You do not need to understand the technology. You need five questions, and they are the same ones I ask when I buy software for my own studio. If a quote does not answer these five lines it is neither expensive nor cheap: it is incomplete, and the difference will surface once work has started.
“Show me a similar project live, and put me in touch with that client.” A vendor who works well has at least one client who picks up the phone and tells you how it went — including the parts that went badly, which are the informative ones. Anyone without that has a portfolio but no relationships, and on a three-month job the relationship is the product.
If you have three quotes open and cannot compare them, bring them: in half an hour we put them on the same line — what each one contains, what all three are missing, and what the thirty-six-month total comes to for each. It is useful even if you then pick one of the other two, and that happens.
If the brief says you need the €2,400 quote and not the €18,000 one, I will tell you and we will shake hands. Selling an ERP sync to somebody with thirty products that change once a year is the fastest way to end up with an unhappy client and a correct website.
It depends on three things, and none of them is the page count. A brochure site done properly, with your own content and no integrations, runs €2,000-9,000. A site with a catalogue that has to stay aligned to an ERP runs €15,000-35,000, because it is a piece of software rather than a brochure. Below €1,500 there is no cheaper site: there is the same work moved onto you — usually entering the products by hand, which is a recurring cost that appears in no quote.
Because they are answering different questions contained in the same line of brief. On one B2B brief — 40 pages, 300 products, two languages — you get quotes of €2,400 and €18,000, and both are correct: in the first, your own staff enter three hundred records by hand forever; in the second, a nightly sync with the ERP brings them in. The spread is not negotiation or margin: it is scope, and you read it by comparing what each quote EXCLUDES, not what it includes.
The useful question is not agency or freelancer, it is who answers in eight months and what happens if you part ways. A good freelancer with a clear contract beats an agency that hands you a site whose logins you do not have; an agency beats a freelancer when the project needs several skills at once and you cannot afford it stalling if one person falls ill. In both cases ask for the same thing: that code, domain and logins stay in your name, written into the quote.
If the site is a brochure that has to exist and be found, a well-built theme is the right answer and spending €18,000 is waste — I say so even when it costs me the project. A theme stops making sense when the site has to do something: stay aligned to an ERP on its own, show different prices to different customers, take orders without anyone retyping them. At that point you are no longer comparing two prices, you are comparing one solution against two that do not solve the problem.
Six, and they are missing from almost every quote: the copy (you write it, and it is the top cause of half-finished sites), photography (€800-3,000 for a product shoot), hosting, domain, certificates and licences (€200-1,400 a year), training (€300-600 for half a day, if it is written down), maintenance (15-20% of build cost per year) and your own time (20-40 hours of somebody who matters, on a three-month project). Added up, they are worth more than the build price over three years.
Three weeks for an adapted theme, six for a site with a designed layout, twelve for a custom build with an ERP sync, twenty if there is also a client area with per-customer pricing. Those are the vendor's timelines: what makes them slip is almost never the code, it is the copy and the decisions. If content is not ready when design starts, multiply every estimate above by one and a half.