A Czech agency described a situation in its article on rates that every buyer of a website knows. The same brief came back with three quotes: twenty thousand crowns from a student, eighty thousand from a freelancer and a quarter of a million from an agency. None of the three was lying.
This article explains why those numbers differ twelvefold and how to choose between them. I have broken my own price list down to individual line items, added the nine things that genuinely push the price up, and worked out what a website costs over five years rather than on the day you sign.
Every figure marked as mine is a real price from my price list, excluding VAT, valid as of 29 July 2026. Where I quote the market, the source is linked at the end.
The short answer, before the rest of it
When somebody asks me over a beer, this is what I say.
| What you need | Price from | Usual lead time | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| One page that says what you do and how to reach you | CZK 15,000 | 2 to 3 weeks | Sole traders, small firms, associations, new projects |
| A company website with a page for each service | CZK 30,000 | 4 to 6 weeks | Growing companies that want enquiries from search |
| A website that does actual work for you | CZK 50,000 | 6 to 10 weeks | Companies losing time on work software could take over |
| An online shop, an application or an internal system | Individual quote | Depends on scope | Projects meant to run and grow for years |
Starting price by scope of the website
Values in CZK
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Single page | 15,000 CZK |
| Company website | 30,000 CZK |
| Website with custom features | 50,000 CZK |
Most companies shopping for a website land in the second row, and they rarely stop at the base. Add two or three items from the list below to a company website and you are at CZK 45,000 to CZK 90,000. That band is the answer to the question in the title, and the rest of the article explains how to move up and down inside it.
Why quotes for the same website differ by a factor of twelve
The spread is neither random nor dishonest. It has three explainable causes and you can check all three in any quote you receive.
First, the hourly rate. In the Czech market a junior asks around CZK 500 an hour, a senior freelancer CZK 1,500 to 2,500, an agency CZK 1,500 to 2,800. That is more than a fivefold difference between the extremes, so three quotes for the same number of hours can legitimately land at CZK 30,000, CZK 90,000 and CZK 160,000.
Second, a scope everyone filled in differently. The sentence we need a new website fits a five page brochure site and a portal with a client area equally well. Whoever assumes less wins on price and negotiates the rest later, as an extra. Whoever assumes more loses on price, and the client never finds out the quote contained twice the work.
Third, whatever is not included. This is where most of the money hides and it is the hardest thing to spot in a quote. Copy, photography, migrating the old content, a second language, hosting after launch. Each of those can add ten to sixty thousand crowns on its own, and in a cheap quote it is simply missing.
The practical consequence: do not compare quotes by the total. Compare them by how many line items they actually spell out. A quote with a single number cannot be compared to anything.
What sits inside the price from CZK 30,000
A price list should be a breakdown of work, not a menu of packages. For a company website, which is the most common case, mine looks like this.
| Line item | Price | What it produces |
|---|---|---|
| Structure and content design | CZK 9,000 | A page for each service, named the way a customer searches for it |
| Multi page build | CZK 14,000 | Pages are rendered on the server, so the browser never waits for JavaScript |
| Custom admin | CZK 5,000 | Swap a text or a photo in ten seconds and nothing can break |
| Training and a video guide | CZK 2,000 | Recorded on your own site, not generic help for someone else's system |
| Total | CZK 30,000 | A website that is entirely yours from day one |
The first row deserves a pause. Structure design is almost two thirds of the build price and it is the best spent part of the whole project. It decides whether the company gets one “Our services” page with bullet points, or six separate pages each able to win search for one specific query. You will not see that difference at a glance. You will see it in the number of enquiries per year.
Cheap quotes almost never contain this item. Not because the author forgot, but because there is nothing to charge for: you get a template and your own copy poured into it.
Nine things that push the price up
Now the important part. These are the nine reasons a “from” price turns into a real price. I quote my own numbers, but the principle holds for whoever you call.
1. Content that does not exist yet
The most expensive part of a website is rarely the code. It is the text. Structure and wording are part of my design work, but specialist copy that only somebody inside your company or a professional copywriter can produce is extra work. Here is what the market charges for it.
So ask every supplier who writes the copy. If you do, it is the cheapest option and also the most common reason a launch slips by three months. If the supplier does, it is faster, more expensive, and you still have to give them somebody who answers technical questions.
2. Photography you do not have
Stock photos kill even the best website. You spot them instantly and so does your customer, even if they could not name what bothers them. A half day shoot at your place costs CZK 9,000 with editing included. On the open market product photography is priced per shot, usually CZK 150 to 2,000 each.
If you already have usable photos, this is one of the few items you can delete outright. There is no point paying to shoot what has already been shot.
3. Every additional language
A language version is CZK 12,000 per language, which at first glance looks like a mistake. It is not, because a language version is not a translation.
The cheap version: the copy gets translated and a switcher appears in the header. URLs stay in the original language, search engines treat both versions as one, an English speaking customer lands on a page that throws them back into Czech, and the admin has one field for two languages.
A real language version: its own URL per language, hreflang markup, a switcher that knows its counterpart on every single page, a redirect from the other language's URL to the right one, and two sets of fields in the admin that cannot drift apart.
I know exactly where that work is, because the language switcher on this very site was the source of three separate bugs, and all three surfaced only in the details: on an article, on a case study, and on remembering the chosen colour theme. Anybody offering you a second language for two thousand is offering translated text plus three bugs you will hear about from a customer.
4. The number of page types, not the number of pages
This is the most common misunderstanding in any price list. Forty products that all display the same way are one piece of work, and adding two hundred more is an hour. Six sections that each look and behave differently are six pieces of work.
An extra page beyond the package is CZK 2,000 including the copy. So when you are weighing up three extra pages, we are talking about six thousand crowns, not another package.
5. Features that calculate or keep records
This is the jump from thirty to fifty thousand. A price calculator, a quote generator, fault reporting from a phone, a service record. The custom features package starts at CZK 50,000 and is made up of the full company website (CZK 30,000), analysis and a data model (CZK 8,000) and building the features themselves (CZK 12,000). That middle item is the one I advise against cutting.
Writing code is not the expensive part. The expensive part is deciding what counts as a record, what is derived from what, and what happens when it changes. Postpone that question and you pay for it twice.
6. Logins and roles
A client area is CZK 24,000 and I understand that it looks like a lot for a form with two fields. It is not a form. It is password recovery, permissions over who sees what, protection against password guessing, secure storage, and a decision about what happens to the data of somebody whose account you close.
If you do not need logins, this is the single best way to save twenty thousand. Most company websites genuinely do not need them.
7. Connecting to a system you already run
The price of an integration with your stock, accounting or attendance system is not set by your wish or by my rate. It is set by the quality of the documentation on the other side. A well documented interface is one day of work. An undocumented one, held by a single external supplier who answers the phone once a week, is three weeks of work, half of it waiting.
That is why I never put a fixed price on it. The honest answer is that I will quote it after one call with whoever maintains that other system.
8. Taking over the old content and redirects
Migrating content from the old site is CZK 7,000 and it tends to be the first thing a client wants to cut. If your site is ten years old and has collected links along the way, it is the worst possible cut: new URLs without redirects mean the rankings you already hold disappear overnight.
9. How many people on your side have to say yes
You will not find this line in any price list, and it moves the price more than most. A project where one owner decides gets delivered on time. A project where the design is approved by the managing director, marketing, sales and the owner's son who studies graphic design gets three extra rounds, and every round is work.
There is no surcharge for it in my price list and I am not blaming anyone. I am naming it: before you send the brief, agree internally who has the final word. It saves money with any supplier.
The price of a website does not grow with the number of pages. It grows with the number of decisions somebody has to make on your behalf
Three budgets as they actually look
So that this is not just a list of items, here are three typical order compositions. Nothing in them was invented for the article: every row is a sum of price list items and you can add it up yourself.
| Who orders it | What is in it | Total |
|---|---|---|
| A sole trader who needs a decent address online | One page site (15,000) and a half day shoot (9,000) | CZK 24,000 |
| A manufacturer that exports and wants enquiries from search | Company website (30,000), second language (12,000), extended SEO (8,000), blog (6,000), content migration (7,000), on site photography (9,000), five extra pages (10,000) | CZK 82,000 |
| A facility manager that wants to cut office work | Website with custom features (50,000) and a client area behind a login (24,000) | CZK 74,000 |
The middle row is the one that usually raises eyebrows. Eighty two thousand crowns for six weeks of work is an hourly rate I could not get away with in Prague. The difference is that the figure genuinely contains everything: photography, the second language and the content migration included.
What does not push the price up, even though people expect it to
There is a set of things that appear as surcharges at many suppliers and are included in every project of mine, because they are done once and then simply hold. If somebody paid me separately for them, it would mean a version exists in which I skip them.
- Works on a phone and on a large screen
- Accessibility to WCAG AA: contrast, keyboard operation and a visible focus ring
- A guaranteed PageSpeed score above 90 on mobile and on desktop
- Groundwork for Google and for AI search: structure, sitemap, structured data
- Traffic measurement with no consent banner, so no third party scripts
- Light and dark mode, if you want it
- Training and a video guide recorded on your own site
- A month of small changes after launch
- The code, the data and the domain are yours, with no licence fees and no lock in
Speed is not a surcharge. It is a decision about how to build the site, and it has to be made at the start
The cost everybody forgets to quote
A website is not a purchase, it is an operation. And this is where the number that decides the five year total actually sits.
The market has two standard answers. One published Czech breakdown puts service retainers at CZK 2,000 to 10,000 a month and annual maintenance at 15 to 25 per cent of the original build price. On a hundred thousand crown website that means CZK 15,000 to 25,000 every year.
My numbers are different, and there is a concrete reason for it rather than a discount.
| Line item | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting, backups and certificate | CZK 400 per month | Server, daily backups, certificate renewal, uptime monitoring |
| Maintenance and small changes | CZK 1,500 per month | An hour of work a month for changes you would rather not do yourself. Unused time carries over |
| Domain | CZK 300 per year | Registration and renewal, in your name and not in mine |
Monthly cost of running a website
Range in CZK
| Label | From | To |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance retainer on the market | 2,000 CZK | 10,000 CZK |
| With me | 400 CZK | 1,900 CZK |
The reason for that gap is not modesty. It is what actually needs maintaining on a site like this. A custom built site has no ecosystem of add ons from twenty different authors that has to be patched every week. Here is the number that explains it better than any argument.
And a second figure from the same report: the weighted median time to first exploit is five hours, and roughly half of high impact vulnerabilities are attacked within 24 hours of disclosure. Of the new vulnerabilities, 1,966 were rated high severity with a risk of mass exploitation, which is 17 per cent. That is why a maintenance retainer on a site assembled from plugins is not optional. It is not a service, it is insurance.
Seen from the other side: the CZK 4,800 a year you pay me for hosting covers the server, the backups and the monitoring. It does not contain the cost of watching somebody else's code, because there is none.
So what does it cost over five years
The build price is one off, the running cost keeps going, so the only honest comparison is a five year total. For a company website it looks like this.
| Line item | One off | Over five years |
|---|---|---|
| Website build | CZK 30,000 | CZK 30,000 |
| Hosting, backups and certificate | CZK 400 per month | CZK 24,000 |
| Domain | CZK 300 per year | CZK 1,500 |
| Total | CZK 55,500 | |
| Per month | CZK 925 |
Nine hundred and twenty five crowns a month. That is what a custom company website costs once you spread it over the time it actually serves you. For comparison, the Business plan on Shoptet works out at CZK 1,341 a month even with the annual discount, and after five years of paying you own nothing.
What makes up the five year total of CZK 55,500
Composition in CZK
- Building the website54%30,000 CZK
- Five years of hosting43%24,000 CZK
- Five years of domain3%1,500 CZK
Total 55,500 CZK
| Label | Value |
|---|---|
| Building the website | 30,000 CZK |
| Five years of hosting | 24,000 CZK |
| Five years of domain | 1,500 CZK |
Does it pay off? Work it out on one deal
Return on a website can be calculated in a complicated way, or in a simple and honest one. I recommend the second.
Take your average margin on one deal. If it is CZK 15,000, the website needs to bring in 3.7 deals over five years to pay for itself entirely, hosting included. That is one deal every sixteen months. If your industry closes more than that, the decision is not whether to build a website but how soon.
The other side of that coin matters just as much: if a website has no way of bringing in even one deal a year, no price is low enough. A brochure site for a company that trades exclusively through three long standing buyers and wants nobody else will not pay for itself at eight thousand either.
And one more number on why execution matters here, not just having a website at all.
One tenth of a second. A difference that small is measurable in money, which says something about quotes where speed is dealt with by the word “responsive”.
When not to pay me
This section does not really belong in an article about prices, and without it the article would be a sales pitch. There are situations where my price is the wrong answer.
- You need three pages with a contact and opening hours and nothing will ever change. Take a website builder for two hundred a month and that is the right call
- The budget is under fifteen thousand. A custom website for ten thousand does not exist, and whoever promises one is saving on the part you cannot see
- You want a website mainly because a company is supposed to have one. With no work for it to do, it is the most expensive box ticked in your accounts
- You are looking for somebody to take over and patch a site built by someone else. I do not do that, because on somebody else's code I could not stand behind anything
- You are deciding purely on the lowest price. You will not find it here, and it is better we establish that on the first call than the third
How to compare the quotes you get
Whoever you end up choosing, this process turns quotes into comparable numbers. It takes half an hour and saves tens of thousands.
- 1Ask every supplier to break the quote into priced line items rather than one number. Anyone who refuses has told you enough.
- 2Mark in each quote who supplies the copy and the photography. This is the most common place where a cheap quote gets expensive after signing.
- 3Ask for the running cost five years ahead, not per month. Multiply it yourself, because no quote will add it up for you.
- 4Verify ownership: whose name the domain will be in, who holds the source code and how you would get your data out if you left. Get it in writing.
- 5Write down three things the site must do in two years and have it confirmed that they are possible and at what price. Ceilings are better found before signing.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a custom website cost for a small company?
A one page site from CZK 15,000 and a company website with a page for each service from CZK 30,000, both excluding VAT. With two or three usual add ons, meaning a second language, photography or migrating the old content, a company website lands between CZK 45,000 and CZK 90,000.
Why do quotes for the same website differ fivefold?
Because of the hourly rate, because everyone filled in the scope differently, and because of items missing from the cheap quote. Czech market rates run from CZK 500 for a junior to CZK 2,800 for an agency, so even at the same number of hours the totals differ several times over.
How much does it cost to run a website per year?
With me, CZK 4,800 for hosting, backups, certificate and monitoring, plus CZK 300 for the domain, so CZK 5,100 a year excluding VAT. With maintenance and an hour of work a month it is CZK 23,100 a year. The Czech market quotes service retainers from CZK 2,000 to 10,000 a month and often calculates annual maintenance as 15 to 25 per cent of the build price.
Do the prices include VAT?
They do not. I am VAT registered, so 21 per cent is added. If you are ordering as a consumer, the quote always states the price including tax.
What if I have no copy and no photos?
Structure and wording are part of the design work, a half day shoot at your place is CZK 9,000, and writing specialist copy is quoted separately by scope. For comparison, copywriters charge CZK 1,500 to 4,000 per standard page, so supplying your own specialist text is the cheapest way to bring the price down.
How much is a second language?
CZK 12,000 per language. It is not translation. It is a separate URL per language, hreflang markup, a switcher that knows its counterpart on every page, redirects from the other language's URL and a second set of fields in the admin.
Is a website for ten thousand crowns worth it?
At a senior rate, ten thousand is six or seven hours of work, so you are not buying design or structure but a template being filled in. For a sole trader who only needs an address online that can be a sensible choice. For a company that wants enquiries it is the most expensive way to get nothing.
How much does an online shop cost?
Individually, because stock, payments, delivery and the accounting integration decide the price, not the number of products. In the Czech market shops run from CZK 40,000 for a setup on an existing platform to CZK 300,000 and more for custom development.
Can the price change during the project?
Not within the agreed scope. The quote I send you as a link is a calculation where you click the scope together and submit the order. A change of scope during the project is a new line item you see and confirm, not an extra invoice at the end.
Summary
- One page site from CZK 15,000, company website from CZK 30,000, website with custom features from CZK 50,000, applications and online shops quoted individually. All excluding VAT.
- The most common real company website order lands between CZK 45,000 and CZK 90,000, because two or three items get added to the base.
- The biggest price drivers are content that does not exist yet, every additional language, the number of page types, features that calculate something, and logins.
- The spread in market quotes is explained by hourly rates from CZK 500 to 2,800, differently assumed scope, and items missing from cheap quotes.
- The five year total for a company website is CZK 55,500, meaning CZK 925 a month, hosting, backups, certificate and domain included.
- Compare quotes by how many line items they spell out, not by the total. A quote with one number is not comparable to anything.
Want a number for your case, not a range from an article
Tell me what the site has to do and I will send you a link to a calculation where you click the scope together yourself and see the price item by item. It commits you to nothing, and it shows you the parts I would advise against as well.
If the call ends with one page for fifteen thousand being enough, I will say so. And if it ends with no website helping you at all, I will say that too.
See the price list item by item or send a no obligation enquiry.
Sources
- Shean: what web and ecommerce development costs in 2025, freelancer and agency rates compared
- Anfilov: what a website costs in 2026, including running costs and service retainers
- The price of product photography, per shot range
- Patchstack: State of WordPress Security in 2026
- Deloitte and Google: Milliseconds Make Millions
- Vceliste: what quality copywriting costs in the Czech market