Longhand · what things cost
What a website should cost in India.
Quotes for the same five-page site in this country can run from ₹8,000 to ₹8,00,000, and both of those numbers can be honest. Here is what separates them.
we build them too. so read this with one eye open.
The four bands, roughly
What we see quoted in India in 2026, for a small business site of about five pages:
- Under ₹15,000. A template, filled in fast, usually by one person juggling six of these. You get a site that exists. The words will be whatever you sent on WhatsApp, and the design will belong to whoever made the template.
- ₹15,000 to ₹60,000. A competent freelancer on WordPress, Webflow or Shopify. Real design decisions, your photos, your structure. Still assumes you arrive with the words.
- ₹60,000 to ₹3,00,000. A studio: strategy, a design made for you, copy written rather than pasted, some custom behaviour. This is where most serious small-business sites actually land.
- Above that. Custom builds, e-commerce with real catalogue work, multiple languages, systems that talk to your billing or CRM. The price stops being about pages and becomes about engineering.
None of the bands is a scam. A dentist with six patients a day does not need the third band. A company whose entire sales pipeline arrives through the site should not be shopping in the first.
What actually moves the number
How many pages have to be thought about. Not how many exist, how many need a decision. A contact page is an hour. A home page is a week, because it has to survive being someone's first eight seconds.
Whether the words exist. More on this below, because it is the item every budget forgets.
How custom the design is. A template bent to fit you is cheap and looks like the template. A design made from your content costs more and nobody can name it.
What it has to talk to. Payments, bookings, inventory, a CRM, a language switcher. Every connection is a small project wearing a checkbox.
Who maintains it. A site nobody can edit without calling the developer is cheaper on day one and expensive for the next three years.
The line nobody budgets for
Almost every late website in India is late because of the content, not the code.
The pattern is always the same. Design is approved with beautiful placeholder text. Everybody agrees the real words will be “sent by Friday”. Three Fridays later the founder is writing the About page at midnight, the developer is idle, and the design that was made for forty words is now holding two hundred.
Budget the words as a line item from the start, at whatever band you are in. Ours start at ₹4,800 a page and go to about ₹28,000 for a home or landing page that needs research and options; that is on the website content page with what each end of the range buys.
What we charge, and why we do both
We write the pages and build the site, which is unusual and sounds like a sales line until you have watched a project die between two vendors. When the same people write and build, nobody is waiting for anybody, the design is made for the real sentences, and there is one person to blame, which is a genuine feature.
Whole sites are quoted per site, because the honest number depends on how many pages need thinking. This site, the one you are reading, is one of ours: five pages, a portfolio that holds twenty-seven mails, a margin you can write in, and a mode that removes all the jokes.
Five questions before you pay anyone
- Who writes the words, and is that in the price? The single most common gap.
- What happens after launch? Who fixes a broken form on a Sunday, and at what cost?
- Can I edit a page without calling you? If the answer is no, price three years, not three months.
- Who owns the files and the domain? The answer should be you, in writing.
- How fast does it load on a phone on mobile data? Ask for a number. Most beautiful sites in India fail this one badly.
If you want the version of this conversation with your actual pages in front of us, that is a call, and the quote comes in writing before anything starts.