How much does a website cost in 2026? The real numbers, with an itemized quote to back them up

Market ranges put a professional custom website between €1,500 and €5,000. With an agency, expect €2,000-8,000 depending on the number of pages, the level of design and the work on content. The public guide from francenum.gouv.fr, the French government's digital agency, confirms these orders of magnitude for small businesses.

What moves the price within that range: a design drawn for you versus an adapted template, the number of distinct page layouts, copywriting, and how much care goes into SEO from the build itself. A €1,500 site almost always sits on an existing template with light customization. A €6,000 site is designed page by page for your brand.

At Sonho, a custom website starts at €2,000 excl. VAT. The quote is a fixed price, set after a discovery call: once approved, the amount never changes, however long the project actually takes.

A Shopify store has two separate cost lines, and mixing them up throws off every calculation. First, the subscription: €27 to €79/month depending on the plan, plus apps (often €100-300/month on an active store) and sometimes a paid theme, between €200 and €400 as a one-time purchase.

Then the project itself. Agency market ranges: €2,500-6,000 for a first store built on an adapted theme, €6,000-15,000 for the redesign of a growing brand with a proper design and carefully built buying journeys, and €15,000 and up as soon as you get into international, B2B or complex selling logic.

At Sonho, Shopify e-commerce projects follow the same rule as everything else: a fixed price set after a discovery call, starting at €2,000 excl. VAT, with an average of six weeks between kickoff and launch.

It is the question that comes up most often on forums, and it is a fair one: for an identical brief, the quotes you receive often differ by a factor of five. Three mechanisms explain almost all of these gaps.

First case: disguised offshore outsourcing. Your contact is in France, the production happens elsewhere, and the low quote reflects an hourly cost divided by five, without you knowing it. Second case: a theme resold as custom work. A €300 template dressed in your colors and billed €8,000 as an original creation. Third case, the most common: scopes that are simply not comparable. One quote includes copywriting, redirects and testing on mobile; the other stops at putting an empty template online.

The defense fits in one request: insist on a line-by-line breakdown of every quote. A provider who refuses to detail what their price covers is already telling you something.

The three options are not selling the same thing. A platform sells a tool, a freelancer sells hours, an agency sells an outcome with several skills combined: design, development, content, SEO.

Here are the market ranges to place each option:

This is the part almost nobody spells out, even though it is what makes quotes comparable. A serious website quote breaks down into six line items, each one representing real human time:

On a €4,000 custom website, design and development together usually account for half the budget. Scoping and testing look like footnotes; they are what separates a site that gets delivered from a site that works. Ongoing SEO is a separate budget: at Sonho, it starts at €800/month, after an audit whose price depends on the scope.

These line items also explain the timeline: expect six weeks on average between the first call and launch, because several steps depend on back-and-forth with you.

A redesign rarely costs less than a new build, and the ranges are wider: €1,500-10,000 for a custom website, €5,000-30,000 for an e-commerce site. The reason comes down to one word: the existing site.

Redesigning means building a new site while preserving everything the old one has accumulated: Google rankings, product pages, customer accounts, inbound links. Every page that changes address has to be redirected, every piece of data migrated and verified. On a store with 500 products, the migration can weigh as much as the design.

The low end of the ranges corresponds to a reskin on the same platform; the high end, to a platform switch with a full migration of data and search rankings. Before comparing redesign quotes, check that redirects and migration are actually in the scope: it is the most expensive omission on the market.

The advertised price of a Shopify subscription is €27/month. The real monthly cost of an active store sits between €80 and €300/month. The gap comes from perfectly legitimate line items that are rarely mentioned at signing time.

Apps first: customer reviews, emails, subscriptions, search. Each costs €10 to €50/month, and a growing store quickly uses five or six of them. Payment fees next: roughly 1.5% + €0.25 per transaction, which is €1,500 a year on €100,000 in sales. And finally, ongoing changes: new pages, journey adjustments, seasonal campaigns.

None of these costs is a trap in itself. The problem is discovering the total six months after launch. Build it into your math from day one, maintenance included.

This is the angle price comparisons never cover: a website should not be judged in the absolute, but against what it is supposed to bring in. A brand doing €250k in revenue that invests €4,000 in its store is spending 1.6% of its annual revenue on the tool that collects most of its sales. The same reasoning applied to a €1M brand makes a €10,000-15,000 budget perfectly rational.

Conversely, an €800 site for a brand that is already selling is almost always bad math: every conversion point lost on existing traffic costs more than the difference between two quotes. The real question is not "how much does the site cost" but "how much does a site that doesn't convert cost".

If you are in that situation, the simplest move is to talk it through: a discovery call is enough to set a firm scope and a fixed price. At Sonho, the number given at the end of that call is the number on the invoice, with no revision along the way.