Why quotes for the same brief range from €500 to €15,000, and how to work out what your business genuinely needs to spend.
Ask five studios to quote for the same website and you will get five very different numbers. That is not because some are greedy and some are generous. It is because the word 'website' covers everything from a single page built on a bought theme to a fully structured platform with custom templates, content modelling and search work behind it.
The useful question is not what a website costs. It is what the website has to do.
What actually drives the price
Almost all of the cost sits in four places: how many unique page templates need designing, how complex the content model is, how much writing and structuring the content needs, and how much technical work sits underneath.
- Number of unique designed templates, not the number of pages
- Content types: services, listings, products, locations, team
- Whether copy and imagery exist or need shaping
- Search requirements and migration from an existing site
- Integrations: bookings, payments, CRM, feeds
Where cheap gets expensive
A €500 site is usually a template with your logo dropped in. It can be fine for a brand-new business that needs a placeholder. It stops being fine when it is the main way customers judge you, because template sites tend to share the same weaknesses: bloated page weight, unclear structure, no real search foundations and no content model you can grow.
The genuine cost arrives eighteen months later, when the site cannot be extended and has to be rebuilt anyway.
A realistic frame for Irish SMEs
For an established small or medium Irish business with real services to explain, projects typically start around €1,500 and rise with scope. Ecommerce and custom functionality sit higher. What matters is that the quote is specific: template count, content responsibilities, search work and post-launch care spelled out before anyone starts.
If a quote does not tell you what you are getting, the number is meaningless in either direction.