How Much Does a Custom Website Cost in 2026?

"How much does a website cost" is an unanswerable question asked a thousand times a day, because a website can mean a five-page brochure or a booking platform with payments. So here are the bands people actually buy in, what moves the number inside each, and the costs that tend to be missing from the quote.

The four bands

Type	Typical cost	Timeline	Right when
Template site	₹25k – ₹60k	1–2 weeks	You need presence, not differentiation
Custom business site	₹80k – ₹3L	3–6 weeks	The site is a sales asset and has to rank
E-commerce store	₹2L – ₹6L	3–6 weeks	You're selling, and checkout logic is yours
Web application	₹3L+	6 weeks+	Users log in and the software does work

If you are not sure which of the last two you need, that distinction is worth getting right before you brief anyone — we cover it in website vs web application.

The six things that actually move the number

• Page count and template count. Not the same thing. Forty pages built from six templates costs far less than twelve uniquely designed pages. Ask any quote which number it is based on.

• Integrations. Payments, CRM, booking, inventory, ERP. Each is a small project with its own edge cases, and each is where fixed-price quotes most often go wrong.

• Content readiness. The biggest cause of overrun, and almost nobody prices it. If copy and images arrive in week five of a six-week build, the build takes ten weeks.

• Custom design vs design system. A designed-from-scratch page costs several times a page assembled from an agreed component set. Most sites need six bespoke pages and twenty systematic ones.

• Performance and SEO requirements. "It should load fast and rank" is engineering work, not a checkbox. It is worth paying for and worth pricing explicitly.

• Who writes it. Agency, freelancer or offshore team changes the rate by multiples for the same output. It also changes who is still there in a year.

What's usually missing from the quote

Budget roughly 15–20% of the build cost per year for the things a quote rarely itemises:

• Hosting and CDN — ₹0 to ₹5,000 a month depending on traffic and architecture.

• Domain and SSL — small, but annual and easy to let lapse.

• Security patches and dependency updates. Skipping these is how a working site becomes a compromised one.

• Content updates and small changes — either your time or a maintenance retainer.

• Analytics and conversion tracking, if you want to know whether any of it worked.

How to compare two quotes honestly

Price is the least informative line on a proposal. Compare these instead:

• Is the scope written down? A number without a scope is a negotiating position. The gap shows up later as change requests.

• Who owns the code and the accounts? It should be you, in writing, from the first commit. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.

• What happens after launch? Warranty length, response times, and what a change costs.

• Who is actually building it? The people in the pitch are not always the people on the keyboard.

Why the cheapest quote is often the most expensive

A ₹30,000 site that has to be rebuilt in eighteen months cost ₹30,000 plus the rebuild plus the eighteen months of leads it did not generate. The cheap option is genuinely right when you need presence and nothing more. It is the wrong option when the site is supposed to sell — and the tell is whether anyone asked you what the site is for before quoting.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do quotes for the same brief vary so much?

Because they are rarely quoting the same thing. One assumes a template and your content; another assumes custom design, copywriting, integrations and performance work. Ask each to state scope in writing and the range usually narrows dramatically.

Can I start small and expand later?

Yes, and it is usually the right call — provided the foundation is built to extend. Ask explicitly whether phase two means adding to this build or replacing it.

Is WordPress cheaper than a custom build?

Cheaper to start, often more expensive to maintain once plugins accumulate. Done properly, with a custom theme instead of a page builder, it is a perfectly good choice.

What does MOMT charge?

Custom business sites start around ₹80,000 and e-commerce builds at ₹2L, scoped and fixed in writing before work starts. Tell us what the site needs to do and we will give you a real number, including when the honest answer is that you need less than you think.