A straight answer first. In Chennai in 2026, a small business website of five to fifteen pages costs roughly ₹30,000 to ₹70,000 from a competent freelancer, and roughly ₹80,000 to ₹1,50,000 from an agency. A single landing page starts around ₹5,000 and runs to about ₹25,000 depending on whether the copy and tracking are included. E-commerce starts near ₹1,00,000 and has no ceiling.
Everything below is why that range is as wide as it is, and how to work out where in it you sit.
What you are actually paying for
Almost all of the cost is pages and decisions. A five-page site and a thirty-page site are not the same job, and the difference is not five times the design work — it is five times the content architecture, the copywriting, the internal linking and the testing.
The other half of the cost is who is doing it. An agency price includes an account manager, a sales process and an office. That overhead is real and it buys you things — continuity if someone leaves, capacity for a large project — but on a ten-page business site it is mostly overhead.
What moves the number
- 1Number of pages. This is most of the cost. Count the services or specialties you want found for separately, because each one needs its own page to rank.
- 2Who writes the copy. If you already have final, approved text, the build is faster and cheaper. If not, budget for it: writing is usually the thing that delays a project, not design.
- 3Photography. Your own photos cost nothing. Sourcing and licensing stock adds time and licence fees. A photographer is a separate line item entirely.
- 4Anything with accounts or money. Bookings, payments, logins and portals are a different category of work to a brochure site, and they carry ongoing maintenance.
- 5Languages. A Tamil or Hindi version is roughly half again on top, not double — the structure is reused, the content is not.
- 6How fast you reply. Every quoted timeline assumes prompt feedback. This is the single most common reason a build slips, and slipped builds cost both sides money.
The costs nobody mentions upfront
These are yearly and they are yours, not your developer’s. Any quote that hides them is hiding them for a reason.
- Domain registration: roughly ₹800 to ₹1,500 a year for a .in or .com. Register it in your own name.
- Hosting: anywhere from free for a static site to ₹3,000 to ₹10,000 a year for standard shared hosting.
- SSL certificate: free on any decent host. If someone bills you for one, ask why.
- Stock photography licences, if used.
- Third-party tools: booking systems, chat widgets, email platforms. These are subscriptions, forever.
- Maintenance. A WordPress site needs updating or it becomes a security problem. A static, hand-coded site largely does not.
Cheap is not the same as bad value
A ₹8,000 website is not a scam by definition. It is usually a template with your logo on it, which for some businesses is genuinely enough — a single-location shop that needs an address, hours and a phone number does not need a bespoke build.
It becomes bad value when it is sold as something else, or when the person who built it holds your domain. That second one is the expensive mistake, and it has nothing to do with price.
The most costly website is not the dearest one. It is the one you cannot move, cannot edit and cannot rank.
How to compare two quotes properly
- 1Is copywriting included, or are you expected to supply every word?
- 2Is SEO structure part of the build, or a later invoice?
- 3How many revision rounds, and what counts as a round?
- 4Who will the domain be registered to?
- 5Will you receive the source code and every login at launch?
- 6What happens after launch — are small edits billed, and at what rate?
- 7Is the price fixed, or an estimate that can move?
Two quotes that differ by ₹40,000 usually differ on four of those seven. Ask them before you compare numbers, or you are comparing two different products.
