The Real Cost of a Custom Website in 2026

Website Pricing Is Confusing on Purpose

Ask five web agencies how much a website costs and you will get five wildly different answers — anywhere from $500 to $50,000+. The range is so broad it is essentially useless. The reason pricing is opaque is that agencies benefit from ambiguity. When you do not know what things should cost, it is easy to overpay.

This guide breaks down what websites actually cost in 2026, what drives the price, and where you can save without sacrificing quality.

The Five Tiers of Website Cost

Not all websites are the same, and prices vary dramatically based on complexity. Here is a realistic breakdown for 2026:

1. Simple Landing Page — $0 to $500

A single-page site with a hero section, a few feature blocks, a pricing table or call-to-action, and a contact form. This is what you need to validate an idea, promote a product launch, or capture email signups.

DIY with a website builder (Wix, Squarespace, Carrd): $0 to $20 per month. You are trading money for time. Expect to spend a weekend getting it right.
Pre-built template (Next.js, Tailwind): $29 to $99 one-time. You get professional code that you own and can deploy to Vercel or Netlify for free. Requires basic developer knowledge to customize.
Freelancer or agency: $300 to $500. Fast turnaround for a simple page, but you are paying for someone else's time on work that templates handle well.

2. Multi-Page Marketing Site — $500 to $5,000

A full marketing site with multiple pages — homepage, about, features or services, pricing, blog, and contact. This is the standard for established small businesses and early-stage startups.

Website builder with premium template: $200 to $500 per year (hosting plus template). Limited customization and performance.
Pre-built template: $49 to $199 one-time. Multi-page templates with blog support, SEO setup, and responsive design. You customize the content and deploy.
Freelance developer: $1,000 to $3,000. Custom design and development, but the process takes two to four weeks.
Agency: $3,000 to $5,000. You get a design process, revisions, and a polished result, but you are paying agency overhead.

3. E-Commerce Store — $2,000 to $15,000

An online store with product pages, a shopping cart, checkout, payment processing, and order management. Complexity scales with the number of products, payment options, and custom features.

Shopify or WooCommerce: $29 to $79 per month plus transaction fees. The fastest path to selling online, with trade-offs in customization and ongoing costs.
Custom e-commerce (headless): $5,000 to $15,000. A custom storefront built on Next.js with a headless CMS and Stripe. Full control, better performance, but higher upfront cost.

4. Web Application (SaaS, Dashboard, Portal) — $10,000 to $50,000+

A web application with user authentication, a database, business logic, dashboards, and integrations. This is fundamentally different from a "website" — it is software.

SaaS boilerplate plus custom development: $5,000 to $15,000. Starting with a starter kit that includes auth, billing, and a dashboard, then building custom features on top. Significantly cheaper and faster than starting from zero.
Custom development from scratch: $15,000 to $50,000+. A development team builds everything from the ground up. This makes sense for complex, unique applications, but is overkill for most MVPs.
Agency build: $30,000 to $100,000+. Enterprise agencies charge enterprise prices. Unless you have enterprise requirements (compliance, scale, integrations with legacy systems), this is rarely the right choice for startups.

5. Enterprise Platform — $50,000+

Large-scale platforms with complex integrations, custom infrastructure, regulatory compliance, and multiple user types. If you need this, you already know you need this, and you are not reading a blog post about website costs.

What Drives the Price Up

Understanding cost drivers helps you negotiate better and cut where it matters:

Custom design: A unique visual design with custom illustrations, animations, and branding can add $2,000 to $10,000 to any project. Using a clean template with your branding applied costs a fraction of that.
Content creation: Photography, copywriting, and video production are often not included in development quotes. Budget an extra $500 to $3,000 for professional content.
Integrations: Connecting your site to CRMs, email marketing platforms, payment processors, or third-party APIs adds complexity. Each integration can add $500 to $2,000 depending on the API quality.
Backend complexity: User accounts, databases, admin panels, file uploads, and real-time features all require backend development. A static marketing site costs a fraction of a dynamic web application.
Revisions and scope creep: The biggest hidden cost in web development. Every "can we just add..." request adds hours. Agencies account for this in their pricing — you are paying for the revisions whether you use them or not.
Ongoing maintenance: Hosting, domain renewal, SSL certificates, CMS updates, security patches, and content updates. Budget $50 to $200 per month for basic maintenance, more if the site requires active development.

Where You Can Save Without Sacrificing Quality

Here are the most effective ways to reduce your website cost in 2026:

Use Pre-Built Templates

Modern website and web app templates are not the generic WordPress themes of 2015. A well-built Next.js template with Tailwind CSS gives you a professional, performant, SEO-optimized site that you fully own and control. The cost is $29 to $199 instead of $3,000 to $15,000. You customize the content, deploy to free hosting (Vercel, Netlify), and you are live.

Start With a Boilerplate for Web Apps

If you are building a SaaS or web application, starting with a starter kit that includes authentication, billing, and a dashboard can save you $5,000 to $20,000 in development costs. You are paying $99 to $199 for weeks of development work that has already been done, tested, and documented.

Deploy to Modern Hosting

Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages offer free tiers that handle most small-to-medium traffic levels. You do not need to pay $50 to $200 per month for traditional web hosting unless you have specific server requirements.

Write Your Own Content

Hiring a copywriter is worth it for your core marketing pages, but you can write blog posts, FAQs, and documentation yourself. AI writing tools can help with first drafts, though you should always edit for accuracy and voice.

Skip the Agency (In Most Cases)

Agencies are the right choice for large, complex projects where you need a dedicated team and project management. For everything else — landing pages, marketing sites, simple web apps — a freelancer, a template, or a starter kit will get you 90 percent of the result at 10 to 20 percent of the cost.

How Refitted Fits In

We built Refitted to fill the gap between free website builders and expensive custom development. Our websites and web apps are built with the same tools professional developers use — Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS — but delivered as custom solutions at startup-friendly prices instead of agency rates.

Whether you need a landing page to validate an idea, a marketing site to establish your brand, a SaaS starter kit to launch your MVP, or automated Google Sheets to run your operations — we build the foundation so you can focus on your business. You get production-quality code that you own forever, with no monthly fees and no vendor lock-in.

The Bottom Line

A custom website in 2026 costs anywhere from $0 to $50,000+, depending on what you actually need. Most small businesses and startups will spend between $29 and $5,000 — and the biggest factor in where you land is whether you start from scratch or start from a template.

Before you request proposals from agencies, take an honest look at what you actually need. A custom-built site tailored to your business might cost less than you think. And if you do go the agency route, you will have a much clearer picture of what you actually need to pay someone to build.