What does a website actually cost?

Ask what a website costs and you'll hear ₺7,000. You'll also hear ₺150,000. Neither answer is necessarily lying to you. "Website" isn't one product — it's a category. The same word covers a single page thrown together over a weekend from a template, and a six-month, three-language corporate platform wired into a payment system. Both get called "our website." That's where the gap comes from.

One note before the numbers: this is an Istanbul-based studio, and every figure below is in Turkish lira (₺). If you're reading from outside Turkey, it's worth checking today's exchange rate to get a sense of scale — I'm not converting the numbers myself, because a rate quoted today is stale by the time you read this, and a stale conversion misleads more than the lira figure does on its own.

This post explains why the range is this wide, which line items pull the price in which direction, and what you need to say to get a quote that actually means something.

Same word, different jobs

A five-page site for a hair salon, built from stock photography, and a logistics company's multilingual corporate platform that talks to inventory and runs a booking panel — these don't take the same number of weeks. The first wraps up in days. The second takes weeks, because most of the work is invisible on screen: integrations, data models, permissions, testing.

When you ask for a quote, the person on the other end is trying to work out which of these you actually mean. "I want a website" isn't enough on its own to price anything — any number given without knowing which kind of job it is comes back either too optimistic or padded with enough of a safety margin to look unrealistically high.

There's a mirror version of this mistake: getting quotes from two different developers for the same budget and reading the gap as "one's expensive, one's cheap." Usually both are pricing correctly — they're just pricing different jobs. One took "five pages" literally. The other heard "five pages" and also inferred a navigation structure, a form integration and an admin panel. Most of the gap between two quotes isn't pricing philosophy — it's a difference in assumed scope.

The six things that actually set the price

Page count. Pages don't add cost in a straight line, but past a certain point they pull the price up. A corporate site of up to eight pages can be priced as one scope; the ninth page onward is its own line item, because every page brings its own content needs and its own design decisions. Asking for a "careers" page doesn't just add a menu item — it drags in an application form, a listing feed, probably an email notification too.

Content production. Are you writing the copy, or is the developer? Most quotes leave this ambiguous, and it becomes an argument later. Writing copy, translating it, picking images, retouching product photos — that's separate work, requiring its own time regardless of the design. The price shifts depending on who owns it. A client who shows up with finished copy and a client who says "you write it" get different quotes even for the identical design scope, because the second one triggers a whole separate workflow: research, drafts, approval rounds.

Design depth. There's a real gap between a page assembled from a stock component library and one designed from scratch with a visual language built around your brand. Custom animation, custom interaction, a layout that doesn't fit an off-the-shelf pattern — all of that is design and development hours. If you want the result to look better, those hours have a price. The difference is often invisible but felt: two sites can both look "modern," but one went through three weeks of design work and the other is a theme with the color palette swapped.

Integrations. Payment gateway, accounting software, a CRM, a booking system — each comes with its own documentation, its own failure modes, its own testing cycle. An integration can look like "a few lines of code" from the outside, but it's usually the single biggest time sink, because you're now dependent on someone else's system: their API changes, their sandbox is slow, their error messages are cryptic, and fixing that is on the developer, not you.

An admin panel. If you're going to update content yourself, you need one. That's not "a few text boxes" — it's a separate software layer that needs permissions, data validation, and protection against bad input. A site with no panel needs a developer for every update; a site with one costs more up front, but every change after that is yours to make. Which one fits depends on how often you'll actually be changing content: updating a price once a month probably doesn't justify a panel; adding listings or products a few times a week means a site without one becomes a burden fast.

Multiple languages. Adding a second language isn't doubling the copy. Every page structure has to work correctly in both languages — URL structure, SEO settings, form validation, all consistent across both. Even with the translated text ready to go, deciding which language lives at which URL, making sure search engines show the right one, and getting the language switcher to work on every page is its own engineering job. This site is published in Turkish and English; I know firsthand how many places a second language touches, in both design and content.

Template or custom build

A template is fast and cheap. You buy a theme, swap the colors, paste in your copy. The problem is that the template wasn't designed for your business: unnecessary sections stick around, the section you actually need is missing, and unused code sits there dragging down page speed.

A custom build is shaped around how your business actually works. On this site, a landing page starts at ₺7,500, a corporate site at ₺15,000, and a redesign of an existing site at ₺9,000 — all listed on the /pricing page. These aren't the price of customizing a template; they're starting prices for work whose scope has actually been discussed with you. The gap between template and custom isn't really about price — it's about what's included: a template gets you "something roughly like this"; custom gets you "you asked for exactly this, you got exactly this."

Worth not mixing up two different categories here. A "website" is a one-time delivery — you pay once, the site is yours. A mobile app is a different kind of job: two operating systems, an app-store review process, a much longer build, which is why it starts at ₺55,000 on this site. SEO and social media management, on the other hand, are monthly services — starting at ₺5,000 and ₺8,000 respectively — paid for ongoing work, not a one-time delivery. When you're comparing quotes, pay attention to which category you're actually comparing; putting a one-time site fee next to a monthly service fee gets you the wrong conclusion.

What cheap actually costs you

A low-priced site usually gets expensive later. Not because of bad intent, most of the time, but because the scope was kept narrow: no speed optimization, no mobile responsiveness work, SEO fundamentals skipped. Six months in, the site doesn't show up on Google, it loads slowly on mobile, and you can't reach the developer to change one sentence, because the job's done and so is the relationship.

At that point you've got two options: patch it up, or rebuild it. The second one is what this site calls a "redesign," starting at ₺9,000. So the cheap start comes back a few years later as a second project fee. Whether the source code is actually yours, whether there's an admin panel — that's what determines the real difference at this point: does the next developer start from zero, or build on what's there.

The difference isn't just development cost, either. A slow, broken-on-mobile site can't turn traffic into customers — you spend the ad budget, the visitor arrives, and leaves because the page loaded too slowly. In that case, the low site price needs to be counted alongside the ad budget you lost. Work that looked cheap on the first quote turns into work you pay for twice within a year: once to build it, once to rebuild it.

How to write a brief that gets you an accurate quote

If you want a real quote, tell the person you're talking to: how many pages you want, who's writing the copy, which systems it needs to connect to, whether you'll update content yourself or leave that to the developer, whether you need a second language. Saying this upfront sharpens the quote; leaving it out means the quote either comes back optimistic and gets revised later, or gets padded against every possibility.

No firm numbers yet? That's fine — just get your page list, the systems you need to connect to, and who's writing copy down on paper. Three or four sentences is enough: "I want a five-page site, I'll write the copy myself, I just need a booking form, and I might want to add products later." Even that one sentence tells a developer far more about the real size of the job than "I want a website" ever will.

A good quote itemizes scope: which page, which integration, how many revision rounds, delivery date. If something outside that scope gets added later, you should know upfront that it's a separate line item — that's what a surprise looks like in this business. When you ask for a price, ask for these line items, not a single number. If you can see where a number comes from, you can trust it.