Methodology: How We Price Website Work
Where the cost figures on this site come from, how the calculators are built, how often the numbers are re-checked, and the five factors that move a real quote away from an estimate.
Methodology: How We Price Website Work
Every cost page on this site puts a number in front of you. This page explains where those numbers come from, so you can judge how much weight to give them.
Where the figures come from
Website pricing has no official rate card. Nobody publishes a statutory hourly rate for a freelance developer the way a government publishes a tax band. So the honest answer is that our figures are market ranges assembled from published sources, not measurements:
- Published rate cards and pricing pages — platform subscriptions (Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow), hosting plans, domain registrars, SSL and CDN pricing. These are exact and verifiable, and we quote them as such.
- Published agency and freelance rate surveys — for labour costs, where the underlying reality is a range rather than a price.
- Publicly documented project costs — where a range is widely reported across independent sources rather than resting on one.
What we do not do is invent a precise-looking number to make a page feel authoritative. Where the honest answer is a wide range, we publish a wide range.
Exact figures versus estimated ranges
This distinction runs through the whole site and is worth holding onto:
| Type of figure | Example | How reliable |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | Shopify Basic monthly fee, a .com renewal, an SSL certificate | Exact — verifiable on the vendor's page |
| Market range | What a freelancer charges for a five-page site | Indicative — real quotes vary widely |
| Composite estimate | Total first-year cost of a small business site | Planning figure only |
A published subscription price is a fact. A labour range is a summary of a market that genuinely varies by a factor of five or more depending on who you ask and where they are.
How the calculators work
The calculators run entirely in your browser. The scope, page counts and feature choices you enter are never sent to a server, never logged and never stored.
Each one works the same way: it breaks a project into priced components — design, page build, feature work, content, integrations, ongoing hosting and maintenance — applies a range to each, and totals them. You get a range rather than a point estimate because that is what the underlying reality is.
How often the numbers are re-checked
Platform pricing changes a few times a year and we update those figures when it does. Labour ranges move more slowly and are reviewed periodically rather than continuously.
Every guide carries a published and an updated date. If a page has not been touched for a long time, weigh it accordingly — and if you find a subscription price that no longer matches the vendor's own page, tell us and it gets corrected.
The five things that move a real quote
These are the usual reasons a quote comes back different from an estimate here. None of them can be inferred from what a calculator asks:
- Where the supplier is. The same scope costs several times more from a US or Western European agency than from an equally competent team elsewhere. Our cost by country guide covers the spread.
- How well defined the scope is. Vague briefs get priced with a risk premium, and then change orders on top. A precise brief is the cheapest thing you can produce.
- Content. Who writes the copy, who sources the images, who does the data entry. This is the most commonly forgotten line and it is rarely small.
- Integrations. Payment, CRM, ERP, booking. Each one is a dependency on a system you do not control, which is where estimates most often break.
- What happens after launch. Hosting, updates, security, backups, and someone to call. Our ongoing website costs guide covers what year two actually looks like.
As a rule of thumb, real projects land at or above an estimate rather than below it. Budget with headroom.
Independence
No platform, host, agency or freelancer pays for placement, ranking or inclusion here. Where a page contains affiliate links, that is disclosed — see the affiliate disclosure.
The site is funded by advertising and affiliate commission. Neither influences which option a comparison recommends: where a cheaper option wins, the page says so, including when the cheaper option pays us nothing.
These are estimates, not quotes
Nothing here is a quote, a commitment, or a substitute for talking to a supplier. Use these figures to sanity-check a proposal, to set a budget range, and to know when a quote is unusually high or suspiciously low. Then get three real quotes.
Corrections
Found a stale price or a calculation that looks wrong? Send the page and what you think it should say through the contact page. Corrections are made on the page and the updated date is changed with them.