What does a website cost?

Website costs in 2026: the price ranges

Every website is different, so there is no price list here: every project gets a fixed written quote after a short call. Websites start from €500. Where we can name a fixed starting price for a format, it is in the table; otherwise it says “on request” – and the next column tells you what to plan for.

What does a website cost at an agency?

At a classic agency, a company website usually lands between €8,000 and €25,000. That is not because the work is different – it is because you also pay for the project manager, the account manager, the meetings and the office. A freelancer sits at the other end: €1,500 to €6,000, an excellent rate, and a single person who may or may not be reachable in two years.

A small studio like Webarkitekt charges considerably less for the same site, because the person who plans it also builds it. There is no layer in between to pay for, and there is a written process, fixed prices and a studio that has been here since 2022.

What moves the price

Five things, in order of impact: the number of pages and languages; whether the design is custom or a refined system; integrations such as booking, CRM, payment or a customer login; how much copy and photography has to be created rather than delivered; and whether you need an admin area to edit content yourself. Speed and accessibility are not extras – they are in every quote.

What does not move the price: the industry you are in, the colour of the logo, or how many revision rounds you take on the layouts in the first week. We would rather get the structure right with you than count iterations.

What a website costs per month and per year

After launch a hand-built site is cheap to run. There are no platform fees and no plugin licences, because there is no platform and there are no plugins.

So a typical company site costs €120 to €360 a year to keep online, plus the care plan if you want us to look after it. Over three years a custom site often costs less than a page-builder subscription plus the hours spent fighting it.

Examples: a restaurant, a craft business, a practice

Restaurant or café: a fast one- to three-page site with the menu as real text (not a PDF), opening hours, a map and a reservation link – websites like these start from €500 with us. The menu must load on a phone in the street; that is the whole job.

Craft business (Handwerk): five to eight pages – services, references with photos, contact, jobs – built so the phone rings: a fixed price by scope. Practice or law firm: team, services, appointment links, accessible and GDPR-clean, often bilingual: also a fixed price, by scope and languages. A founder launching a product usually starts with a landing page and grows it later.

Website costs and tax: deducting and booking them

For a business or a self-employed person, a website is a business expense. The one-off build is usually capitalised and written off over three years (the standard useful life the German tax authorities apply to websites); running costs – domain, hosting, care – are deducted immediately in the year they occur. Small amounts may fall under the low-value-asset rules and be deducted at once.

Your accountant will book the build to the intangible-assets account of your chart of accounts (SKR03 or SKR04) and the running costs to the appropriate expense accounts; we provide invoices that make that split obvious. This is general information, not tax advice – for your case, ask your Steuerberater. We have written more about it on the blog.

What a serious quote includes

A written scope (pages, languages, features), a fixed price, a timeline with a launch date, what you have to deliver and by when, what happens after launch (hosting, ownership, care), and what is explicitly not included. If a quote has a day rate and no total, or a total and no scope, ask again.