A five to eight page business website in India costs ₹15,000 to ₹40,000 from a freelancer and ₹40,000 to ₹80,000 from a small agency in 2026. A DIY builder costs ₹3,000 to ₹15,000 a year, and once you go past a brochure site into stores and custom applications, the real number starts at ₹1,00,000 and climbs from there. Those are the bands I see in the market, and they are the bands I quote inside. What follows is why the same five-page site gets two wildly different prices, and what each one actually buys.
Why the same five-page site quotes at ₹8,000 and ₹80,000
Page count is the worst way to price a website, and it is how most buyers and most sellers start the conversation. Five pages of a template with your logo dropped in is two days of work. Five pages with a custom layout, copy written for you, proper enquiry tracking and a search setup that a small business can actually maintain is three weeks.
The price moves on five things: whether the design is custom or from a template, who writes the words, how much has to talk to something else (payment gateway, CRM, WhatsApp routing, booking calendar), how many rounds of feedback you want, and whether anyone answers you in month nine. Everything else is noise.
I have walked into projects where a ₹12,000 build had to be thrown away after a year because the layout broke on mobile and the developer had moved to a full-time job. That rebuild cost more than doing it once.
The four routes, and what each one really costs
DIY builders: ₹3,000 to ₹15,000 a year
Wix, Hostinger's builder, Shopify's basic plan. The attraction is obvious and the arithmetic is not as cheap as it looks, because you rent the site forever and you pay with your own weekends. Search control is limited, moving the site off the platform later means rebuilding it, and the moment you want something the theme does not do, you are stuck.
This is a fair choice when you are testing whether an idea has legs, or when you genuinely need one page and a phone number.
Freelancers: ₹15,000 to ₹40,000 for a small business site
Hourly rates in India run from about ₹500 to ₹1,500 for mid-level freelance work, and ₹2,500 and above for people who have been doing this for a decade. For a project price, a five to eight page business website usually lands between ₹15,000 and ₹40,000, and custom applications or member areas start around ₹60,000.
You are buying speed and direct access. You are also buying a single point of failure. The good ones book up, the rate goes up as their reputation does, and the honest risk is not quality. It is continuity.
Small agencies: ₹40,000 to ₹80,000 for a starter site
An agency carries a designer, a developer, someone doing QA and someone answering your calls, so the floor is higher. For that money you usually get a site that is built to be handed over properly, with structured data, analytics and a documented launch checklist.
The larger engagement, a site with a CMS, a blog and search work set up, runs ₹80,000 to ₹2,00,000. Ecommerce and custom builds start at ₹3,00,000. For calibration, Clutch's listing pages today show Indian agencies with rates near $25 to $49 an hour, while US web design firms sit at $100 to $149 an hour for comparable work.
In-house: only when the website is the product
If your site changes weekly and it directly earns revenue, hiring someone is cheaper than paying an agency forever. For everyone else, a salary to maintain a brochure site is the most expensive option on this list.
The costs that never appear in the quote
Every one of these is real, and most quotes stop before them.
Domain renewal is ₹800 to ₹1,500 a year. Hosting on a modern static setup like Vercel or Netlify is often ₹0 for a business site, while shared and VPS hosting runs ₹2,000 to ₹12,000 a year. SSL is free everywhere now, and anyone charging you for it in 2026 is either selling you a premium certificate you do not need or padding the bill.
Content is the sneaky one. If you cannot supply your own service descriptions and photos, writing runs ₹1,000 to ₹5,000 per 1,000 words, and photography is separate. A site with eight pages of real copy can carry a content bill nearly as large as the build.
Then there is GST. Services are billed at 18 percent, so a ₹30,000 quote reaches you as ₹35,400 once the invoice is raised. Freelancers with turnover under the registration threshold may not charge it, which is part of why their headline number looks lower.
And after launch, if you want updates, backups and small edits handled for you, expect a retainer of ₹5,000 to ₹15,000 a month in India depending on how much you send their way.
Does the city change the price?
Yes, by roughly 20 to 40 percent, and it is the least discussed variable in every cost guide. A Bengaluru studio with rent, salaries and a review process cannot quote what a solo developer in Erode can. A Chennai or Mumbai agency will usually price a five-page site at ₹60,000 and up, while the same scope from a Coimbatore freelancer lands near ₹25,000.
None of that says anything about quality. Most of the good work I see shipped for small businesses in Tamil Nadu is done by one or two people working from home, and most of the bad work I see repaired also came from a big-city agency with a proper invoice. Where you hire from matters less than whether the person shows you a live link, a phone number that works, and a client who will vouch for them.
How I actually price a project
I quote a fixed price for a defined scope, and I ask questions before naming a number, because a quote given on a phone call is a guess with a signature under it. The questions that change the price most: do you already have a Google Business Profile with your correct address, who is supplying the photos, does every enquiry need to reach a specific person, and will you be publishing content yourself once the site is live.
Last month a dentist in Coimbatore asked for "a simple website". Simple turned out to mean online appointment booking, three clinic locations and Tamil plus English copy. That is not a ₹25,000 project, and the honest thing is to say so on the first call rather than discover it in week three.
Two smaller builds I did recently, a premium interiors studio and a dental foundation site, both needed roughly the same effort: a day of scoping, a week of layout and copy structure, then the build. Neither of them was expensive by agency standards and neither was a template. You can look at that work on the portfolio page if you want to judge the output rather than the price band.
Where AI search changes the brief in 2026
A growing share of the people who would have found you on Google last year are now asking ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation instead. That changes what a website has to do. Answers get lifted out of a page in two or three sentences, so the first fifty words of your service page have to stand alone as a complete answer. Organization and FAQ schema stop being decoration, since models read structured data more reliably than they read your About page. Being named on Reddit threads, directories and review sites matters more than the fifth internal link.
I fold this into the build rather than selling it as a separate retainer, because once the site's structure is right, most of the work is already done. What I cannot do for you is become your name on third-party sites overnight. If you want to understand how search visibility is shifting, start with my earlier pieces on why your site is not showing up on Google and Google's preferred sources button.
What a fair quote looks like
A quote worth accepting names the deliverables page by page, says who writes the copy, states the number of revision rounds, and tells you what happens in the first month after launch. It also settles the boring questions before you pay anything: the domain gets registered in your name, the hosting account is yours, and you get the repository or CMS access at handover.
If a proposal is one page of pricing and nothing else, ask for the rest in writing. The developers who object to that are usually the ones you would end up chasing.
What I would budget
If you run a clinic, a shop or a local service business and you need a credible site that brings enquiries, budget ₹25,000 to ₹50,000 for the build and add a small monthly retainer only if you would rather not touch it yourself. If you are a startup that needs to publish content and rank, plan ₹80,000 to ₹1,50,000 plus a separate content budget. If you are selling online, start at ₹1,00,000 and expect the store to keep asking for money every quarter.
Below ₹25,000, use a builder. Above it, pay for structure and handover, not for a prettier template.
If you want a number for your own project instead of a range, tell me what the site needs or see the services page. One related read before you sign anything: what website maintenance should actually cost in India.