How much does a website cost in 2026?

Discovery as a product of its own: the decisions that are expensive to reverse, settled in writing by the lead engineer who would build it. It ends in a document you can act on, not a dependency on us.

Buyers who want the architecture decided before the budget, teams comparing suppliers on the same scope, and in-house teams who will build it themselves. A brochure site does not need it: the proposal already reasons the stack for a build that size.

• Plain-English architecture note: data model, rendering, hosting, integrations, trade-offs
• Performance and accessibility budgets drafted for sign-off
• Itemised build estimate you can take to us or to anyone else
• One walkthrough call with the lead engineer who wrote it

• The build itself
• Design (see Web design or UI/UX design)

Turnaround

1 to 2 weeks

Moves the number

Integration count: every third-party system in the brief is another boundary to draw, and boundaries are where the thinking is.

The site or application itself, quoted as a fixed price against an itemised scope: front end, back end and the APIs between them, built to the budgets agreed in discovery and demoed as working software.

Businesses whose site must do something a template cannot: accounts, workflows, calculations, integrations. It does not fit a content-led site an editorial team will run, where WordPress or Webflow does the job for less, or a store, which is priced under eCommerce.

• Architecture agreed and repository live in your accounts in week one
• Front and back end built to agreed budgets, measured on every release
• Senior review on every merge and QA before every demo
• Architecture notes, environment runbooks and deployment docs maintained as we build
• IP assigned in the contract

• Hosting and third-party service fees
• Content entry and copywriting
• Design where it is not already signed off (see Web design or UI/UX design)
• Post-launch maintenance (retainer below)

Turnaround

Content sites in weeks, web applications in months; first feature on staging within 14 days of NDA

Moves the number

Custom application logic: a marketing site is templates, a web application is rules, and rules take longer to get right than pages.

The years after launch, as a monthly relationship with a named engineer: dependencies and security kept current, the site watched, small features shipped from a shared backlog, performance held to the budgets from the build.

Any site with users, dependencies and someone who will notice when it breaks. It does not fit a site that never changes, or a team with its own engineers who need us only for an occasional larger feature, which is priced as its own project.

• Dependency and security updates applied on staging first
• Monitoring with a named engineer on the response
• Small features and fixes from a shared backlog, reviewed on every merge
• Performance measured against the budgets agreed at build

• Larger features, scoped as their own project
• Hosting and licence fees

Turnaround

Monthly, 3-month minimum

Moves the number

Engineering hours per month: a retainer that mostly watches costs less than one that mostly ships.