Strategy
8 min
What actually drives the cost of a website
Why similar-looking sites are priced differently, where budgets grow unnoticed, and what to send a studio so the estimate is a number rather than a threefold range.
Templates are counted, not pages
Clients describe a site by its page count, while effort follows the number of genuinely different templates. Forty pages where thirty-five are one card type cost less than twelve pages laid out twelve ways. The first question on an estimate is not how many pages, but how many of them differ.
Where budgets grow unnoticed
Design rarely inflates a budget; the seams do. An ERP integration, payments, a marketplace feed, shared sign-on with an internal portal — each adds format negotiation, error handling and scenario testing that never appears in a mockup. The second quiet line item is content: if copy and photography do not exist, producing them becomes part of the project.
What matters less than people expect
Animation and 3D scenes sound expensive but are usually a bounded amount of work with a predictable result. Budgets move far more on dull things: how many user roles exist, how many states each form has, what happens when a payment fails, and who owns the content after launch.
How to narrow the range before the call
An estimate stops being a threefold range once a studio has four things: examples you like and dislike, the list of required integrations, a straight answer on whether content exists or has to be produced, and clarity on who signs off. That is enough for a specific conversation.