What is the average cost of building a website?
Jul 29, 2024 5 Minute Read
We get this question a lot, and the answer is surprisingly varied. Every business has a complicated mixture of needs based on it (and its owner’s) maturity + marketplace position + resources + experience. This is because a website is ultimately a tool, specialized to meet you and your professional needs.
A business tool like website is difficult to imagine (the pages you interact with are the tip of the iceberg; the tip of the tip), so we like to use the analogy of a building. All sorts of businesses need all sorts of buildings to function: a co-working startup needs offices, a landscaping company needs sheds, a shipping company warehouses, and an airline needs airport hangars.
Because there’s so many building types, it’s easier to group them by how complex they are to make.
Level 1 - Legos
Imagine an ambitious ten year old that wants to sell lemonade subscriptions to her neighborhood. Because her needs are very simple and she has very little business experience and money, she will do fine with a site builder with a built-in payment processor. At this level, your website is literally an “app” on someone else’s platform, and you have very little technical control over it.
It’s not even cookie-cutter; it’s drag-and-drop-and-pray with site builders like Wix, in that you use their site designer to create all the website’s pages, and then pray that the bank will work with one of the payment processors there. This inability to tailor the solution to meet complex business requirements, is why the price range is usually a subscription that goes from $17/mo to $159/mo.
Level 2 - Cookie-Cutter
Now consider a realtor in his mid-thirties, finally breaking out on his own. He knows the real-estate market, he knows branding, and generally knows what he wants. He already knows Wix won’t work with the real estate marketing databases he trusts, and that the plugin for his bank is outdated.
This is where a cookie-cutter solution like Wordpress comes in. In most cases, it has most of what he needs already baked in, and since the website doesn’t exist as an app inside Wix, his web developer has full control over it; that means they can work closely to create a design that’s completely on-brand, and then create or customize the plugins for his real estate database and bank.
Since developer must create customized work in Wordpress to meet specific business needs, this takes additional time and skilled labor and time—the same way creating an addition to an existing house’s blueprint demands a skilled contractor’s labor and materials. That’s why projects in this range are anywhere from $1,000-$5,000.
Level 3 - Custom
Now imagine you’re the Assistant Professor at College of Prestigious Business Management. Your boss, who thinks everything is a Human Resources problem because he got his Chair Professorship that way, now wants a unified and highly detailed database all jobs posted on hustle-culture sites like Fiverr and Upwork for all Professors to reference—current to the last 90 days in perpetuity. As the resident “Data Guy” on your boss’s team, you’re it!
As a “Data Guy” with an accredited Assistant Professorship to prove it, Wix doesn’t even cross your mind—or Wordpress for that matter. Instead you immediately spend the first couple of weeks studying job posts on both sites to design the database.
It’s very cool, and it makes your Assistant Professor heart proud….but now what? How do you actually get all those job posts from both sites into your cool database? This is where you pull the same trick your boss just did: turn around and stick that hot-potato on a custom web developer.
The specialist you hire then looks at your database design and techno-babbles that “your database design needs a few tweaks here and here to work in reality; we’ll spin up a 1x3 array of cloud VM running Chrome to host the front-end scrapers, with CodeIgniter 3 on the back-end. Oh and such-and-such asynchronously rotating IP pools and load balancers are a must to avoid bans. ”, and then hands you a bill for anywhere from $10,000 - $50,000+
Through the powers of your Assistant Professorship, you realize that you’re paying for near-peer levels of expertise for the developer to 1.) instantly lecture YOU on your database design at a glance, then 2.) ALREADY have a strategy to harvest the data, and then 3.) somehow already know that you’ll need async rotating IP pools and load balancers.
You immediately tell him to shut up and take your money—because you realize that this guy will do in a month what a team of 10 cheaper guys struggle will do in six months. At this level, what you’re paying for is equivalent a whole team of specialized developers, except they all live in one head, and don’t have to schedule Zoom meetings.
