Web Design Pricing
What Custom Design & Build Actually Costs
The three ways web design is billed, the six variables that move the number more than anything else, and the rates we publish openly instead of gating behind a discovery call.
Looking for the capability page instead? See custom website design.
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Read this first
Why “How Much Does a Website Cost?” Has No Single Answer
“Website” is not a unit of work. It describes a five-page site for a local practice and a storefront with tens of thousands of SKUs, a B2B pricing engine, and a live ERP connection. Those two things share a word and almost nothing else — not the disciplines involved, not the team, not the timeline. Any figure quoted before someone knows which one you are is a guess dressed as an answer.
There is also a less charitable reason pricing gets withheld: an agency that sees your budget before it names its price can shape the price around the budget. The defence against that is not extracting a number early — it is understanding the model well enough to read a proposal properly. A quote you can interrogate is worth more than a quote you can compare.
So this page does three things. It explains the billing models and what each one is genuinely good for. It names the variables that move a build's cost more than anything else, so you can tell which apply to you. And it quotes the figures this site already publishes — verbatim, with links to their source. Where we do not publish a number, you will find the model instead of an invented range, because a made-up “typical” figure anchors you to something nobody will honour.
Pricing models
Hourly vs Fixed Scope vs Flat Monthly
Nearly every web design engagement is one of these three, or a sequence of them. The choice is really a choice about who carries the risk of the unknown — you, the agency, or neither, because the scope has been deliberately bounded.
Hourly
Iterative work, ongoing improvement, and anything genuinely unknown.
An hourly rate is the unit every other model is built from. It fits work whose end state cannot be described up front — an evolving design system, a phased build, a store that needs continuous merchandising and template work after launch. You carry the risk of an uncertain total, and in exchange you keep the right to change your mind mid-flight without renegotiating a contract. It is the wrong model when you need budget certainty for an approval committee.
Published rate: $185/hour. Design and development engagements start there.
Fixed scope
A defined site with a defined page count and a launch date.
A fixed-scope build prices a specific deliverable: this many unique templates, this many content pages, these integrations, this migration, this launch date. The agency absorbs estimation risk, which is why fixed-scope quotes carry a margin for the unknown — and why the discovery phase that produces the number is real work rather than a formality. Change requests price separately, at the hourly rate, which is exactly as it should be: the fixed price is only meaningful if the scope it names is fixed too.
Scoped from the same $185/hour basis, delivered as a line-item proposal.
Flat monthly
You want a professional site without a capital project.
The subscription model replaces a large one-time build cost with a recurring fee that bundles design, build, hosting, and ongoing changes. It suits businesses that need a credible site and steady updates more than they need a bespoke commerce platform. The trade-off is boundaries — page counts, template flexibility, and how custom the front end can get — in exchange for no upfront build invoice and no maintenance surprise.
Published WorkspaceCMS plans: $89, $199, and $449 per month, with the site build included on a 12-month plan.
Every figure above is quoted from a page you can check. The $185/hour rate is published on our platform design pages — Shopify web design, WooCommerce web design, and Magento web design, and it is the same rate we charge for out-of-scope and custom-scope work on our published SEO packages. The flat monthly plans are published in full, tier by tier, on WorkspaceCMS. You will not find a project total anywhere on this page, because we do not publish one — a build total is a function of the six variables below, and quoting a “typical” figure before we know yours would be a number nobody could honour.
What moves the number
Six Variables That Set Your Range
When two quotes for “the same website” differ by a multiple, one of these is nearly always the reason — and it is usually a difference in what was assumed, not a difference in greed.
Unique templates, not pages
The most common budgeting mistake is counting pages. What costs money is the number of distinct layouts that must be designed, built, made responsive, and QA'd. Fifty product pages sharing one template is cheap; five pages that each need their own layout is not. Before you compare two quotes, count the templates each one is really promising.
Catalogue and data complexity
A brochure site and a storefront with configurable products, variant matrices, tiered B2B pricing, and a live ERP feed are different disciplines wearing the same word. Data modelling, import scripts, and the reconciliation work of a migration routinely outweigh the visual design in hours. If your build includes moving an existing catalogue, treat that as its own line item rather than folding it into the design budget.
Integrations
Each third-party system — ERP, PIM, 3PL, subscription billing, tax, review platform, marketing automation — is a separate contract with its own API, its own edge cases, and its own failure modes to handle. Integrations are where fixed-scope quotes most often go wrong, because the vendor's documentation rarely predicts how their sandbox behaves. Name every integration in the brief; an unnamed one is a change order waiting to happen.
Content readiness
Who writes the copy, who shoots the photography, who normalises product data. A build waiting on content is a build burning schedule, and content production commissioned mid-project is the most common reason a launch date slips. This is the single variable a client controls most directly, and the cheapest one to fix before the project starts.
Custom versus configured
A well-configured theme with brand-aligned styling is a legitimate outcome, not a compromise — plenty of successful stores run on one. A fully custom front end costs more because every component is designed and built rather than adapted. The right question is not which is better but which one your differentiation actually requires: if your advantage is your product range, spend on merchandising; if it is your brand experience, spend on design.
Compliance and accessibility
Accessibility conformance, regulated-industry disclosures, and data-handling requirements add design constraints, review cycles, and remediation passes. They are far cheaper designed in than retrofitted — a colour system and component library built to contrast and focus requirements from day one costs a fraction of auditing and repairing a finished site.
If your build includes moving platforms, price that workstream separately — see eCommerce platform migrations for what a migration actually covers, and accessibility compliance for the conformance workstream.
What you actually get
What Changes as the Investment Goes Up
These are levels of engagement, not price brackets. Read them as a ladder of what is being bought — the further down you go, the more of the outcome is designed for you specifically rather than inherited from a platform.
Subscription site
Flat monthly, build includedA small, professionally designed marketing site with hosting, SSL, unlimited content updates handled for you, and technical SEO configured at launch. Our published WorkspaceCMS plans are $89, $199, and $449 per month, and a 12-month plan includes the site build itself. What you are trading away is bespoke front-end freedom and a large custom template set. What you are buying is predictability and never having to chase a developer for a copy change.
Configured build
Platform theme, brand-aligned, commerce-readyA production storefront built on a platform theme, restyled to your brand, with the commerce fundamentals done properly — information architecture, navigation, product templates, cart and checkout flow, Core Web Vitals, and SEO-safe URL handling. This level buys competence and speed to launch rather than novelty. Most stores that grow do so because of merchandising and traffic work, not because their theme was bespoke.
Custom design and build
Original design system, custom templatesOriginal UX and visual design, a component library built for your brand, custom templates, and development against your specific commerce logic. This is the level where design decisions are yours rather than inherited, where unusual product types and B2B workflows can be modelled properly, and where integrations are built rather than bolted on. It is priced from scope: template count, integration count, and data complexity.
Replatform or headless
Migration, architecture, and risk managementMoving platforms or decoupling the front end adds an entire workstream that has nothing to do with visual design: data migration and reconciliation, URL mapping and redirects so hard-won rankings survive, parity testing against the old store, and a cutover plan. Priced individually and built up from hours, because the risk profile of every migration is different — and because the cost of doing it badly is measured in lost organic traffic, not in design revisions.
Scope context by discipline: custom website design, custom website development, and conversion optimization for the post-launch work that decides whether the build pays for itself.
Build cost vs running cost
Two Ladders: Your Own Stack, or WorkspaceCMS
A build price is only half the maths. The other half is what it costs to get the site found once it exists — and that figure depends on which platform the site runs on. We publish two separate ladders, and the cheaper one carries conditions that have to be read before the number means anything.
1. Standard ladder — for brands on their own stack
This is the ladder for a site you own and host yourself: Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, or a headless front end. Local and National are separate ladders, and National costs more at every level for a structural reason — the keyword universe is wider, the competing set is national rather than a radius, and the content and authority work needed to move a national term is simply more work than moving the same term in one metro.
| Tier | Local SEO / month | National SEO / month |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | $899 | $1,499 |
| Essential | $1,599 | $2,499 |
| Pro | $2,499 | $3,299 |
| Plus | $3,299 | $4,299 |
| Premium | $4,499 | $5,999 |
One-time onsite projects
Not every site needs a retainer. Onsite SEO is also sold as fixed hour buckets — an audit and a remediation pass on the templates you already have, with no ongoing commitment.
- 5 Hours$1,699
- 10 Hours$3,199
- 15 Hours$4,399
Anything outside the tier
Work that falls outside a package's scope — extra template development, a migration workstream, custom integration work, a design sprint mid-retainer — is billed at the published rate of $185/hour. It is the same rate the design and development engagements at the top of this page are built from, which is why a build and a retainer can be scoped against one another honestly.
Every tier above, with the full deliverable list for each, is published in the standard table. See also SEO pricing and local SEO pricing.
2. WorkspaceCMS campaigns — cheaper, and here is exactly why
When the site runs on WorkspaceCMS, we control the platform. Technical implementation, page creation, and schema changes stop being negotiations — nobody is waiting on a theme developer, a plugin author, or someone else's release queue, and nothing has to be re-explained to a third party before it can ship. That is agency hours removed from the work rather than discounted off the invoice, and it is the entire reason these numbers are lower. It is a structural difference, not a promotion, which also means it does not expire.
Read both conditions before you use these figures
- An active WorkspaceCMS site plan is required. The campaign is an add-on on top of a plan, not a replacement for one, and the two are billed separately. Plans start from $89/mo (published in full on WorkspaceCMS: $89, $199, and $449 per month, with the site build itself included on a 12-month plan). Your true monthly figure is plan + campaign, so compare that total against the standard ladder rather than the campaign price alone.
- Local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global SEO. If you sell nationally or internationally, this ladder does not apply to you at any price — a national brand pays the standard National ladder regardless of which platform the site is built on, because the work itself is genuinely bigger.
Local SEO + AI
- Essentials Local$499/mo
- Growth Local$699/mo
- Premium Local$999/mo
Terms: 6-month commitment, then month-to-month. Requires an active site plan from $89/mo. Local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global SEO.
PPC Local
- Essentials PPC Local$499/mo
- Growth PPC Local$699/mo
- Premium PPC Local$1,200/mo
Terms: Month-to-month — cancel anytime. Ad budget funded directly in your own Google/Meta account. Requires an active site plan from $89/mo. Local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global SEO.
Full campaign detail is published at workspacecms.ai/campaigns. If you operate several branches, read multi-location SEO alongside it — multi-location still counts as local.
How the free build changes the maths
| Route | Entry point | Build cost | Conditions |
|---|---|---|---|
| WorkspaceCMS site + local campaign | $499/mo campaign, plus a site plan from $89/mo | Included on a 12-month plan | Active site plan required; local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global seo. |
| Your own stack, local market | $899/mo (Local Launch) | Quoted from scope, built up from $185/hour | None — any platform, any host |
| Your own stack, national market | $1,499/mo (National Launch) | Quoted from scope, built up from $185/hour | The only route for national or global search |
Read the first row against the second and the trade is clear: a local business that is willing to run on our platform starts marketing at $499 a month rather than $899, and does not pay a build invoice at all on a 12-month plan — the capital cost of the site collapses into the subscription. What it gives up is the bespoke front-end freedom described in the levels above, and the option of a national campaign at these prices. A brand whose differentiation genuinely lives in a custom experience, or whose market is the whole country, should price the second or third row instead and treat the build as a capital project.
Total cost of ownership
The Costs That Sit Outside the Build Quote
A build price is not an ownership price. Four categories routinely sit outside it, and a proposal that never mentions them is not cheaper — it is less complete.
- Platform and app fees.Your commerce platform's own subscription, transaction fees, and the third-party apps that fill functional gaps are billed by those vendors, not by your agency. They are a permanent line in the budget and worth auditing annually.
- Hosting, security, and maintenance. Someone has to patch, monitor, back up, and renew. On a subscription plan this is included; on a custom build it is a separate arrangement, and the honest version of that conversation happens before launch rather than after the first incident.
- Content production.Copywriting, photography, and product data normalisation are real work whether an agency does them or your team does. Assigning them to “we'll handle it internally” without naming an owner is the most common cause of a delayed launch.
- Acquisition. A new site does not generate demand by existing. Budget for organic and paid growth alongside it — the two ladders above are the published figures ($899/mo to start on your own stack locally, $1,499/mo nationally, or $499/mo for a local campaign on an active WorkspaceCMS plan), and SEO pricing explains how that side is structured. A beautiful site with no traffic plan is the most expensive kind of cheap.
Get a real number
Tell us the scope and we'll price it
Send your current site, your platform, roughly how many unique templates you think you need, your catalogue size, and every system that has to connect. A senior strategist replies within one business day with a line-item proposal — or an honest “a subscription plan would serve you better than a custom build.”
Prefer to talk it through first? Contact us.
Web Design Pricing FAQ
How much does a website cost — design, build, and getting it found?
The only honest answer that isn't a guess is what we publish. Design and development engagements start at $185/hour, and a custom build is quoted as a line-item proposal built up from that rate once the scope is known — template count, catalogue complexity, and integrations. If you want a professional site on a flat monthly fee instead, our WorkspaceCMS plans are published at $89, $199, and $449 per month with the build itself included on a 12-month plan. Getting the site found is priced separately, on one of two published ladders: on your own stack, monthly SEO runs from $899 (Local) and $1,499 (National) up to $4,499 and $5,999, with one-time onsite projects from $1,699 and out-of-scope work at $185/hour. On WorkspaceCMS, local campaigns start at $499/mo — but that price requires an active WorkspaceCMS site plan (from $89/mo, billed separately from the campaign) and is local only: single and multi-location businesses, never national or global SEO. What we won't do is quote you an "average website cost" — those figures vary by an order of magnitude depending on who was surveyed, and they anchor you to a number nobody will actually honour.
Why is local SEO cheaper on WorkspaceCMS than on my own site?
Because we control the platform, not because we discount the work. On WorkspaceCMS, technical implementation, page creation, and schema changes don't burn agency hours negotiating someone else's theme, plugin, or dev queue — the hours come out of the job rather than off the invoice, which is why $499/mo is sustainable there and $899/mo is the honest entry price on a stack we don't control. Two conditions travel with the cheaper number and neither is negotiable: it requires an active WorkspaceCMS site plan (from $89/mo — the campaign is an add-on on top of the plan, so compare plan + campaign against the standard ladder), and local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global SEO. Campaign terms are 6-month commitment, then month-to-month.
I sell nationally. Can I still get the WorkspaceCMS campaign price?
No, and it's worth being blunt about it rather than letting it surface on a call. The campaign ladder covers local search only — single and multi-location businesses. National and global SEO is priced on the standard ladder from $1,499/mo regardless of what platform your site runs on, because a national keyword universe is wider and the competing set is harder, and no amount of platform control shrinks that work. Moving to WorkspaceCMS is still worth considering for the build economics and the implementation speed; it just doesn't change which SEO ladder a national brand is on.
Why won't you give me a price before a discovery call?
We publish the rate and the model precisely so you don't have to sit through a call to learn them. What genuinely requires a conversation is the total, because the total is a function of your template count, your data, and your integrations — and we don't know those yet. If any agency gives you a firm project total before seeing your product data and your integration list, they have either priced in a large risk margin or they will be back with change orders.
Fixed price or hourly — which should I ask for?
Ask which risk you'd rather carry. A fixed price transfers estimation risk to the agency, which means it includes a margin for the unknown and it locks the scope — changing your mind costs a change order. Hourly is cheaper when the project runs smoothly and open-ended when it doesn't, but it lets you evolve the design as you see it. A common and sensible pattern is fixed-scope discovery and design, then hourly for the build phase where the requirements are now known.
Is a template-based site actually worse than a custom build?
No — it's a different trade, and for a lot of businesses it's the better one. A well-configured theme with brand-aligned styling, correct information architecture, and clean performance will outperform a poorly executed custom build every time. Custom design earns its cost when your differentiation genuinely lives in the experience, when your product model doesn't fit standard templates, or when you have integrations that need building rather than installing. If your advantage is your catalogue or your service, spend the money on merchandising and traffic instead.
What makes one quote three times another for the same brief?
Almost always a difference in assumptions rather than a difference in rate. Count the unique templates each quote promises, check whether content production is included or assumed to be yours, look at how many integrations are named, and see whether migration and redirect mapping are in scope or listed as "if required." Then check the labour mix — senior design and in-house development cost more to deliver than outsourced production, which is a legitimate trade as long as you know you're making it. Put the proposals side by side on deliverables, not on the headline figure, and the gap usually explains itself.
What ongoing costs should I budget for after launch?
Platform subscription and app fees, hosting and security maintenance, content production, and acquisition. On a flat monthly plan, hosting and unlimited content updates are part of the fee. On a custom build they're a separate arrangement, and it's worth settling that arrangement before launch rather than after the first incident. Budget for growth work alongside the site — a new build doesn't create demand on its own.