Quotes for the same brief range from ₹8,000 to ₹8 lakh. Here is what actually drives the number, and where cheap gets expensive.
Ask five agencies to quote for the same website and you will get five numbers that look unrelated. That is not because four of them are lying — it is because 'a website' describes anything from a five-page template to a custom platform.
What actually drives the price
Three things move the number more than anything else: how much of the design is custom, how many templates the site needs, and how much functionality sits behind it. A brochure site with six pages and a contact form is a fundamentally different build from an e-commerce store with inventory, payments and shipping logic.
Design
A template applied to your logo is cheap and looks it. Custom design — wireframes, a visual system, states for every component — costs more and is usually the difference between a site people trust and one they bounce from.
Templates, not pages
Twenty pages that share one layout cost far less than five pages with five distinct layouts. When you compare quotes, compare template counts.
Functionality
Forms, logins, dashboards, payments, multi-language and integrations each add build and testing time. Be specific about what you need at quotation stage — this is where scope creep usually starts.
Where cheap gets expensive
The ₹8,000 website is generally a page builder on shared hosting with no structured data, no performance budget and no admin training. It ranks poorly, loads slowly on mobile and needs replacing within eighteen months. You pay twice.
A sensible way to budget
Decide what the site must achieve in its first year — enquiries, orders, applications — and work backwards. If the site needs to produce twenty qualified enquiries a month, that is worth a real investment. If it exists so people can check you are real, a smaller build is honest.
Questions to ask any quotation
- How many unique page templates are included?
- Who owns the domain, hosting and source code?
- Is the content management system included, and will you train our team?
- What is covered after launch, and for how long?
- Are hosting and domain renewals inside the price or billed separately?
A good quotation answers all five without being asked.
- Web Development
- Budgeting
