Website Development Cost in India: What 2026 Guides Charge, and What a Fair Quote Looks Like

What 2026 price guides publish for a small-business website

There is no single market price, and the published guides prove it. We opened ten of them in October 2026 and lined up what each says a small-business site costs. The bottom line moves from ₹3,300 to ₹40,000 depending on who is selling.

Ranges copied as each page states them. Pages define “small business” differently, which is the reason the numbers disagree. Sources are listed with links so you can check them yourself.

Read the table by seller type. Template and package sellers such as Nikitha and GoDaddy’s static example sit under ₹20,000. Agencies and studios, such as Zethic, Secuodsoft and Mediaverse, sit between ₹30,000 and ₹2,00,000. Our reading of these pages is that a five to ten page WordPress site from an agency most often costs ₹30,000 to ₹80,000 before GST, and that anything below ₹20,000 should come with a clear explanation of what is left out.

For the tier-by-tier view of what each type of site usually includes, see the cost tables on our website development page.

Why two quotes for the same website differ by five times

“A five-page website” describes the page count and nothing else. Most of the gap between quotes comes from five things the page count hides.

1. How much of the design is customA licensed theme takes a day to set up. A design drawn for your business takes days per page type. This is usually the biggest single gap between two quotes.
2. Who writes the contentPublished per-page writing rates run ₹2,000 to ₹4,000 (GoDaddy) and ₹2,000 to ₹10,000 (Secuodsoft, OrangeMantra). Supplying finished text and photos yourself is real money saved, and unwritten content is the most common reason projects stall.
3. What the site has to doA contact form is easy. Payments, logins, bookings, stock that syncs with billing software, or a second language each add days of work.
4. How many rounds of changes“Unlimited revisions” is how fixed-price projects turn sour. A named number of rounds, written into the quote, protects both sides.
5. Who builds itA freelancer, a small studio and a large agency price the same brief differently, mostly because of what happens after launch.

The cheap quote normally assumes a ready-made theme with your logo dropped in, text you supply and one round of changes. The expensive one normally assumes a design made for you, someone writing the words, speed and mobile work, and a period of fixes after launch. Both can be honest. The trouble is that neither says which it is, so you compare two numbers that measure different amounts of work.

Website cost by number of pages

People search by page count (“how much does a 5-page website cost”, “a 20-page website”), so here is what the published guides say for each size. Page count sets the floor; the five factors above set where you land above it.

The five-page static figure and the five-page WordPress figure describe different products: the first is a fixed template, the second is a site you can edit.

GST: the 18% that is often added after the quote

Many price guides quote figures without tax. Web design and development services are generally taxed at 18% GST in India, so a ₹50,000 quote excluding tax is ₹59,000 on the invoice.

Two details matter when you compare quotes. First, ask whether each figure includes or excludes GST, because a quote that includes it looks 18% higher than a rival’s that does not. Several published sources are explicit about this: Nikitha’s packages and DomainIndia’s domain and hosting prices are both stated excluding GST, and Hostinger’s cost guide says its prices are listed without GST.

Second, a provider only charges GST once registered, and a business that is itself GST-registered may be able to claim the tax back as input credit on a business expense. Whether that applies to you depends on your registration, so confirm with your accountant. We are not tax advisers, and the rules and thresholds change, so check the current position on the government GST portal before relying on any figure here.

The three-year cost: renewals, plugins and maintenance

The build is a one-off. Everything after it is a subscription. DomainIndia’s cost guide makes the point with a comparison: a ₹15,000 website with ₹10,000 a year of licences and maintenance costs more over three years than a ₹25,000 site with none.

Watch for renewal cliffs. MilesWeb’s domain page, seen on 7 October 2026, shows a .in domain at ₹1 for the first year on a three-year term and ₹849 a year after; its .com is ₹399 and then ₹1,599. Promotional first-year prices are normal, but the renewal price is the one you will pay for as long as you keep the site.

An illustration with our own assumptions (domain and hosting about ₹2,000 a year per DomainIndia, one plugin at ₹3,000 a year inside Hostinger’s range, care plan in the ₹2,000–₹5,000 band), not a quote. Add 18% GST to the build and to paid services.

Maintenance is the line that changes the answer, and doing it yourself is a perfectly reasonable choice if you are comfortable logging in monthly. What does not work is assuming it happens by itself: WordPress, its theme and every plugin ship security updates, and neglected plugins are the usual way small sites get broken.

Freelancer, agency or website builder

The right choice depends on your budget and on how much of the project you can manage yourself. Hourly rates are the one place where the published guides disagree most.

The same unit, an agency hour, is published as ₹1,000–₹3,000 on one page and ₹5,000–₹20,000 on another. When published rates disagree by five times, ask for a fixed price against a written scope instead of comparing hourly rates.

A freelancer is a good fit when you know what you want and can write your own content; the risk is that one person can be ill, busy or gone. A studio or agency is the better fit if you want content, design and search handled together and want a team behind the site; ask who actually does the work. A website builder suits a test or one page needed this week. Shopify’s own cost guide lists its Basic plan at $39 a month (February 2026), and a July 2026 payments-industry report puts it at ₹1,499 a month on yearly billing, ₹1,768.82 with GST. Builders cost less to start and more over three years, and they give you less control over speed and structure.

There is no moral ranking here. A freelancer who answers the phone beats an agency that does not.

How to compare two quotes line by line

Send every company the same questions and put the answers side by side. A good answer is specific and written down; a red one is vague, verbal or missing.

Who owns the domain, hosting and code

Ownership is the costliest thing to get wrong because it is invisible until you want to leave.

Four things should be in your name or under your control on launch day: the domain registration, the hosting account, the WordPress administrator login, and the site files plus any licensed theme or plugin keys. You can check the first two yourself by logging in to the registrar and the host with your own email address, not by trusting a screenshot.

Published examples of doing this properly exist. Nikitha’s page states that the domain is registered with the client’s details and email, and that the full source code is provided after final payment and launch. If a provider is vague about it, ask them to put it in the quote.

The dispute is not hypothetical. A user on the Lawrato legal Q&A site (April 2023) described an agency that would not transfer a domain registered in its own name. The lawyer who answered said this could amount to breach of contract and listed a legal notice and a suit for specific performance among the routes. That is one lawyer’s view on one case, not legal advice, but it shows how slow and expensive recovery is compared with asking the question before you pay.

How payments should be staged

Paying everything first leaves you no way to push if the work stalls. Paying nothing until the end is unrealistic for the developer.

Published practice varies. Nikitha states 50% upfront with the balance due on or before go-live. Another common pattern is a smaller deposit, a payment at design approval and the balance at launch. What matters more than the split is that payments are tied to stages you can see, such as page plan approved, design approved and site live, and not to calendar dates.

Consumer complaint sites carry stories of advances paid and no work delivered, and the pattern is the reason staged payments exist. Each such story is one person’s account and not proof about any company, but it is a good reason never to pay a large amount before you have seen a written scope and a first design.

Red flags worth walking away from

Some offers are cheap because they are efficient. Others are cheap because of what happens next. These are the signals that matter.

• A very low price with no scopeLow prices are not automatically bad. Nikitha publishes a ₹3,300 start-up package with the domain registered in the client’s name. The warning sign is a low price with no list of what is included.
• The domain registered in their nameThe costliest error on this page. Recovery from an unwilling holder can take months or fail.
• No written scopeA single number in a WhatsApp message gives you nothing to hold anyone to.
• A guarantee of first-page Google rankingsNobody outside Google controls rankings, so nobody can promise a position. A company that does is inexperienced or hoping you will not check.
• Full payment up frontStaged payments against milestones are normal and protect both sides.
• A portfolio of screenshots with no live linksOpen the live sites on your phone and ask the business owner whether they would hire the developer again.

Extras if you are building an online store

A store adds costs that do not appear in a build quote: payment fees, platform fees and tax on both.

Razorpay publishes a 2% fee on most domestic payments (cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets), 3% on EMI and Pay Later, and 3% on international cards, with no setup fee or annual charge (page updated 17 September 2026). GST of 18% applies to that fee, so the 2% becomes roughly 2.36% in practice. Razorpay also offers new merchants a time-limited zero-fee period; treat that as a promotion, not a plan.

Store builds themselves are priced higher on every guide: from about ₹30,000 for a Shopify store at the low end (Akoode) to ₹1,00,000–₹5,00,000 for 100 to 1,000 products (GoDaddy). Our website development page covers how we approach stores.

If you are paying from abroad

Many overseas buyers hire Indian developers because the same work costs less. A few points save arguments later.

Ask for the quote in the currency you will actually pay, and agree who bears bank and conversion fees. Prices in this guide are in rupees; convert them at the day’s rate rather than a rule of thumb. Services exported from India are generally zero-rated for GST when the supplier files under a Letter of Undertaking, but that is the supplier’s and your accountant’s job to confirm. Zethic’s cost guide publishes its tables in both rupees and dollars if you want a second reference point.

Time zones, not price, are the usual friction. Agree the hours when a person will answer you, the days a review will take, and who your single point of contact is.

A worked example: an eight-page clinic website

Numbers in the abstract are hard to judge, so here is how a quote for a small clinic typically divides. This is an illustration of how we scope projects, not a price.

Design and build together are only about 55% of the work. That is why “just build it, I will send the content later” rarely saves as much as expected: planning and content are a quarter to a third of the job whoever does them.

How to set a budget you will not regret

Work backwards from what the website has to do, not from what feels affordable.

If the website is mainly there so people can check that you exist, a template site at the lower end is a sensible choice and spending more is hard to justify. If advertising will point at it, or buyers size you up on it before they call, the site is a sales tool, and the useful comparison is not ₹15,000 against ₹50,000 but what one extra customer a month is worth to you.

Our own rule of thumb, and not a published figure: keep about 20% of the build budget aside for the first six months after launch. Every site needs changes once real visitors arrive, and the businesses that get value from a website keep adjusting it.

If you want a second opinion on a quote you already have, send it to us. We will tell you whether it looks fair and what is missing from the scope. Our website development service page lists what we include.

Frequently asked questions