"How much does a website cost?" is the first question almost everyone who contacts me asks, and the usual answer out there is "it depends". That is true, but it does not help anyone decide whether a call is worth booking. So here are my starting prices, what each one includes, and what pushes them up or down.
One note before the numbers: I invoice as a company (Diogo Duarte, Sociedade Unipessoal Lda.), so every figure below is a "from" price and VAT at 23% is added on top. A site from 690 € costs at least 848.70 € with VAT. I would rather you did that sum now than found it on the invoice.
Starting prices
- Showcase site (1 to 5 pages): from 690 €. Its own design, built for mobile, basic SEO, Google Business Profile set-up, a contact form, in Portuguese or in Portuguese and English.
- Site with booking, orders or an editable menu: 1,200 € to 2,500 €. Includes an admin area where the business changes its own prices, opening hours and photos without calling me.
- Small online store: 2,000 € to 4,000 €. Catalogue, cart, MB WAY and card payments, and a back office to manage orders.
- Custom software, back office or SaaS: from 4,000 €. No price list works here. After the first conversation you get a proposal with a fixed scope and a fixed price, and the project can be split into phases.
These are one-off prices for the work of building the site. What it costs to keep the site online month after month is a separate matter, covered below.
What pushes the price up or down
Two "five-page" sites can have very different prices. The difference nearly always comes down to one of these:
- Number of pages, and number of page types. Five pages sharing one layout are quick to build. A services page, a gallery, a page per product and a blog are four different designs.
- Languages. A second language does not double the price, but it adds work: copy, menus, forms, automatic emails and SEO for each version.
- Booking, orders or payments. Once the site stores data and acts on it (a booking that blocks a time slot, an order that reaches the kitchen, a payment that has to be confirmed), it is no longer a showcase site and moves up a tier.
- Back office. An admin area to change the menu is simple. One that manages customers, statuses, per-person permissions and reports is software.
- Who writes the copy and who supplies the photos. If you hand me the text and good photos of the place, the price stays close to the minimum. If I write it, organise the information and deal with the images, that is extra work, and the proposal says so. I never invent clients, figures or testimonials to fill a page.
What brings the price down is the opposite: a short, clear scope, content that is ready, and someone available to answer questions during the project. A small site done well now can grow later, in phases.
Build price and monthly plan
A site has two separate costs: building it, paid once, and keeping it online and up to date, which recurs. I keep them apart on purpose. The monthly plan is optional.
Essential: 29 €/month
- Hosting, a .pt domain and an SSL certificate.
- Backups and monitoring, so I know the site is down before a customer tells me.
- Up to 30 minutes of changes a month: new opening hours, a photo, a price.
- Support by email or WhatsApp.
WordPress: 59 €/month
- Everything in Essential.
- WordPress core and plugin updates, and the site's security.
- Up to 2 hours of changes a month.
The WordPress plan costs more because WordPress needs more looking after: code running on the server, third-party plugins and frequent updates. I explain the difference in more detail in WordPress or a custom site.
Anything beyond the included time is 45 € an hour, always quoted first. The plans have no minimum commitment: cancel whenever you like. And if you would rather not have a plan at all, that works too. You pay for the build once, I hand everything over, and you host it wherever you want.
Either way, the domain, the code and the accounts belong to the client. The domain is registered in your business's name, and if you ever want to change developer, the site goes with you.
What a fixed-scope proposal contains
After the first conversation I send a written proposal. It is not a number pulled out of the air. It always has:
- What gets built, page by page and feature by feature.
- What is left out. This matters as much as the list above, because it is where misunderstandings are avoided.
- A fixed price, with VAT shown separately.
- Actual dates, not "a few weeks".
- Phases, on bigger projects. You can stop at the end of any of them and keep what has been built.
- Who owns what: domain, code, service accounts.
Changes during the project are quoted before they are built. The number only moves when the client decides it should.
The hidden costs worth checking
Whether you work with me or someone else, some costs rarely show up in the first quote. Before you sign, ask these questions:
- Domain and email renewals. The first year of a domain or a mailbox is sometimes discounted and the second is not. Ask what the renewal costs, who pays it and whose name it is registered in.
- Paid plugins and themes. A WordPress site may depend on a theme or plugins with a paid licence. Ask which ones, whether the licence is yearly and whose name it is in. If it stops being paid, the security updates stop too.
- "You don't own your site." Some register the domain in their own name, build the site on a platform you cannot export anything from, or hand over a site with no access to the code. The day you want to leave, you find out you have to start from scratch. Ask in writing for the domain to be in your business's name and for the code and logins to be handed over.
- Hosting lock-in. Hosting included "for free" with the site can turn out expensive if the site only works there. Ask whether you can move it to another host and what that involves.
- Changes billed piece by piece. Changing your opening hours should not need a quote. Find out in advance what a small change costs and how long it takes.
None of these is bad in itself. A paid licence can be worth every euro. The problem is finding out afterwards.
Next step
If you already have an idea of what you need, tell me in a few lines: what the business is, what the site has to do, and whether you already have copy and photos. I will reply with the tier it fits and, after a conversation, a fixed proposal. If what you need is smaller than you think, I will tell you that too.