A website is an abstract concept, just like a house, a car or clothes; an abstract concept cannot have a price. Therefore, start the conversation with what you need and we can determine the initial cost. A one-page presentation of a service (landing page) is a website, and the Google search engine is also a website (although this term is rarely applied to it, but formally it is so). It is perhaps difficult to imagine another subject area where the range of prices for specific implementations within one area would be so wide.

I want to make a reservation right away, this will be more of a general philosophical vision of the issue than a technical justification for pricing.

What the customer should know about the price:

1. Any site with an admin panel and the ability to fill in content yourself, costing from $200 to $5,000 (the range is not strict) is usually a site made on a ready-made engine (CMS) with a template design and functionality determined by the capabilities of the engine. By the way, these possibilities are very wide and cover more than 90 percent of all needs. A website on a modern engine is good! These are modern, flexible, proven and tested solutions. An individually developed website from scratch with similar functionality will cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it is not a fact that it will be better. Don’t follow the lead of the newly-minted bicycle inventors – it’s better to buy yourself a high-quality production model.
2. A high-quality professional individual – not template – design (only design!) costs from $1000 – the simplest one. The upper limit can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. This is creative work, its cost also greatly depends on the name of the designer or the authority of the company’s brand.
3. Be prepared for the fact that everything is relatively inexpensive as long as it fits within the framework of ready-made solutions – engines, templates, themes, plugins, modules… Since these frameworks are not known to you, just know: if the price for some “trifle” (as it seems to you) is suddenly incredibly high, it means that there is no ready-made solution for this “trifle” or the developer does not know about it. Ask him to look for known tools to solve similar problems. Don’t insist on your vision, give the developer a little freedom and, perhaps, he will select for you an inexpensive tool that solves the problem even better than you imagined.
4. The average cost per hour for an average web developer (designer or programmer) ranges from $10 to $50. Good is more expensive. Don’t be under any illusions: average price – average developer – average result. There are exceptions, of course, but you shouldn’t count on them.
5. If you were promised a seemingly identical site in one place for $100, and in the second for $1000, then most likely the difference lies not only in price, but also in quality, licenses, guarantees, etc. Try to find out, don’t be fooled by the price right away.
6. On the other hand, with “famous” companies you pay for the brand. And for reputation, and reputation is a guarantee of quality and risk reduction. Here, like on a scale, just weigh the importance of these factors for yourself personally.
7. Sometimes it makes sense to behave like in a car dealership, i.e. directly ask: “What can I afford for the amount of N dollars?” A decent developer will give an honest answer, a dishonest one will deceive you in any way. How to identify a decent developer is in another article.

General advice: Research the market, determine the average cost for your order type. Focusing on the figure and taking it for granted, study other aspects of the proposed performers – little things can make a difference.

A very common mistake of the customer is to find a cheap contractor, spend the Nth amount of money, get an unsatisfactory result or even unfinished work, and then look for someone to finish it or correct it for, again, a small additional payment, because part of the work seems to have been done, and you we’ve already spent money.

Answer: none of the, again experienced and responsible, developers will undertake this! Redesigning (finishing) a website is almost always a thankless and unrewarding job. Here I ask the reader to simply take my word for it, because the explanation of all the arguments for this statement is worthy of a separate large article. One thing I can say is that it is always painful to see such a situation and refuse, realizing that the person is caught in a closed, and also shrinking, circle of unsuccessful financial decisions. The solution here is difficult, but there is only one – “raise your hand and…” start again.

In conclusion, I will allow myself a platitude: in website development, as well as in other areas of IT, as indeed everywhere else, miracles with prices do not happen. Pricing laws are the same in any area.