How much does it cost to make a website in 2023?

There are several ways of building a website: making it without any third parties with the use of website builders or hiring someone to do it for you. Among the most popular website builders are Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy. With them, you can easily make a website for free without coding. Usually, you’ll need to pay extra for the widgets, subscription, and domain.

A DIY website will definitely cost less than making a website with a web agency or a software company. However, consider some issues.

• Should you need a customized website, you’ll need design skills, as website builders’ purpose is to offer ready solutions.
• Complex customization is possible with website builders. However, it will be the same as building a website from scratch. Therefore, any advantages of using a website builder are lost in such a case.
• Hence, once the business grows, upscaling will require building a website from zero to implement all the necessary features.

Any estimation process starts at the stage of analytics. Usually, software companies can only make approximate calculations of the project while trying to fit into the client’s financial capacity. At Ronas IT, we calculate hours that will potentially be spent on a particular project’s development and name the amount based on hourly rates.

The cost of a website can vary significantly depending on its complexity or the longitude of the flow. What else? For sure, geographic location is a huge factor influencing pricing, as well as the specific expertise of the software company you’re hiring.

Anyway, we’ll share cost ranges for website development in 2023 based on our own experience.

Click on the link if you’d like to know more about website development services at Ronas IT and estimate your project.

Costs depending on the type of website

Before we get into more details, let’s roughly divide them into two types based on complexity: websites and web applications. The end user just accesses both in the browser and may not distinguish them. However, it’s important for the business owner.

The website isn’t supposed to interact with customers, offer subscriptions, or collect and secure users’ data; it just provides static information. Whereas, a web app is a piece of software stored on a remote server and is accessed via a browser. Users see it as a platform with which they interact. Anyway, we’ll mention a few of them, too, in case you decide that the web app is a better choice for your business.

Landing page

A landing page is the simplest way of promoting services or products; often its main goal is to persuade users to fill in some kind of form or download a file. One of our latest projects of this kind was a UKRClub web app that we supported with the landing page, which was supposed to inspire users to download the app. One designer and one web developer were involved in the landing creation. Its difference from the website builders is that the page matches the overall design of the app, which creates a pleasant user experience.

The price for a one-page design and development might be around $3,000. What may increase the figure is animation, as it requires extra effort in design and development.

Corporate website

By this, we mean a website that has at least such spaces as a starting page, services, about, blog, and contacts. It aims to tell about the company itself, cover the whole range of services, and make them attractive to potential clients.

Let’s take a website with 4 blocks as an average: a page about a company, a services page, a page about the team, and a blog. According to the open sources, the cost range for building a corporate website like this is going to cost around $4,000–$30,000. Our pricing for such a solution is usually around $12,000–$20,000 for both design and development.

E-commerce

These are websites that provide online shopping and selling of goods and services, allowing users to purchase items anywhere in the world. Such websites can comprise thousands of pages and require a big storage place.

A basic e-commerce website cost can be pretty inexpensive. Actually, anyone can easily build a site for selling goods with an out-of-box solution like Shopify. An approximate cost for a pre-made solution can be valued at $500. At Ronas IT, we only work with complex e-commerce websites that cannot be made with website builders and require writing code. A complex solution is usually estimated at $30,000–$50,000.

Educational website

As you can see from its name, it’s a digital platform providing educational content for users. These can comprise video lectures, assignments, schedules, and interactive tasks. Among the top are platforms like Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy.

An average cost for an educational website might be somewhere around $10,000 in case it’s made with the help of platforms like Moodle. Ronas IT makes websites like this from scratch, our price for developing an educational platform MVP varies from $30,000 to $50,000.

Blog

Blogs feature regular updates on a variety of topics such as current events, lifestyle, and personal experiences. They allow people to communicate and share their thoughts and opinions with others and can be an invaluable marketing and promotional tool for businesses.

The approximate cost of building a blog is around $300. The low price of building a blog is due to ready solutions. You don’t really need to hire a software company to make a simple website. Probably, the best way to build web platforms like blogs is to use a website builder like WordPress.

Portal

These are websites that provide a gateway to other websites and services on the internet. They provide users with access to content from multiple sources in one place and can be used to create customized experiences for customers.

Depending on the complexity of the design and desired features, development costs can vary greatly, the same can be applied to the news website creation. The price for making a decent web product in this case can be estimated at around $50,000 and higher.

Software as a service (SaaS)

This is a cloud-based software delivery model, providing users with access to the applications via the browser. These are hosted by the server provider. SaaS eliminates the necessity of installing and running an app on a customer’s computer. To give an example, almost any management software products such as Click Up, Jira, Trello, and Asana are SaaS platforms.

If you’ve ever worked with management platforms, you can tell that a SaaS product sometimes has a branched, complicated structure. Generally, the cost of building a basic SaaS platform can range from $10,000 to $50,000, while more complex platforms can cost more than $100,000. Let’s take an MVP as an item for estimation; our price would be somewhere around $40,000. However, it heavily depends on the idea of a SaaS platform.

Social networks

Type: web app

Social networking websites allow users to create profiles, add friends, and share content. They provide an easy and convenient way to stay connected with friends and family. As for the business side, social networks help to engage more users into purchasing products or building income on subscriptions or premium offers.

Social networks can be named an umbrella term for many kinds of platforms, from messengers to the giants like Facebook. Developing a standard functionality costs around $30,000. The social networks field is extremely competitive, and it requires a unique idea and outstanding customization behind any new product. It’s quite hard to forecast the price of something that’s supposed to be nothing like other players in the market.

Streaming service

These are subscription-based services that provide users with access to audio or video content. Usually, the content is streamed directly to the device. Among the most popular streaming services nowadays are Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, Apple Music, Tidal, and Spotify.

Depending on the complexity of the website, the cost may range from around $20,000 to $100,000. However, if you’re heading towards creating a complex streaming app with many features, you can expect to spend even more money on development.

Other positions influencing the cost

Domain name

You will likely want a domain name that ends with .com; these are more expensive ones. We are not joking about the prices mentioned above. Moreover, the range is not the highest. If a domain name is extremely popular, it can cost you tens of thousands of dollars per year. To check the availability of the domain name, you can use websites like domain.com or name.com.

Website hosting

It’s a service that helps to publish website files and data to the World Wide Web — it’s where you store them. The cheaper type is shared hosting; it suits small businesses and startups. This type of hosting unifies more than one website’s data. Another type is dedicated hosting, which follows the principle of one hosting for one website and is the best option for large websites. The lowest price for this type of storage is around $50. For digital products that we build at Ronas IT, the minimum hosting price is around $100 as we work with cloud architecture and containerized applications.

Admin panel

Note that the cost is for developing a custom admin panel. At Ronas IT, we use the Laravel framework for building such solutions. If you don’t need any specific features for the administration, going for a ready CMS is definitely an option. Look for making a CMS with services mentioned in the beginning.

Marketing

Once you develop a website, your next step is to draw people’s attention to it. Such instruments as search optimization engines (SEO) might come into play. The average expenses on just SEO are $500–$2,000. If you add advertising to the cost, then it will be in between $9,000 and $12,000.

To sum up

These were approximate prices for the creation of websites of various types. Of course, one can give an accurate estimation only by discussing a specific project. Even then, in the process of development, additional costs may arise, since the customer adds new features to the product. To be sure that you get a good result for the money invested and that you are provided with transparent and accurate pricing, just contact our managers.