Ask three agencies to quote for the same five-page website and you will get three wildly different numbers. We have seen the same brief quoted at €400 and at €9,000 in the same month.
Neither figure is automatically wrong. They are pricing completely different things. Here is how to tell them apart.
The four price bands
Under €800
At this level you are buying a template, filled in. Usually a purchased theme, your logo dropped in, and stock photography. The copy is either written by you or generated and lightly edited.
That is not automatically a bad purchase. For a brand-new sole trader who needs something credible online this month, it beats having nothing at all. What you should not expect is for it to rank, to convert particularly well, or to be adjustable later without a rebuild.
Watch for: monthly “website fees” that never end and leave you owning nothing, and domains registered in the builder’s name rather than yours.
€1,200 – €3,000
This is where most established Irish small businesses land, and it is where our own work sits. At this level you should expect a custom design rather than a theme, copy written for you, mobile-first build, working quote forms, and the technical SEO groundwork done properly from the start.
You are paying for judgement more than production. Someone deciding what goes above the fold for a roofer versus a dentist, and why.
€3,000 – €8,000
Larger sites: a page for every service, location pages across a county, booking or quoting integrations, multi-branch structures, sometimes a brand identity built alongside. Ongoing SEO usually starts here as a separate retainer.
Worth it if you are competing in a crowded market or your average job value is high enough that two extra enquiries a month pays for it.
€8,000+
Custom applications, e-commerce at scale, multi-language, integrations with trade or practice management systems. Genuinely necessary for some businesses, badly oversold to many others.
Where the money actually goes
For a typical €2,000 project, the split looks roughly like this:
- Research and structure — around 15%. Keyword research, competitor analysis, deciding what pages exist and why.
- Copywriting — around 25%. Usually the most underestimated cost, and the reason projects stall.
- Design — around 25%.
- Build and testing — around 25%.
- Launch, SEO setup and training — around 10%.
Notice that design and build together are only half. If a quote seems very low, one of the other three is missing — and it is almost always the copywriting and the research.
The ongoing costs nobody mentions upfront
Every website has running costs. Be suspicious of anyone who implies otherwise:
- Domain — roughly €20–€30 a year for a .ie
- Hosting — €10–€40 a month depending on what is included
- Maintenance — €40–€150 a month for updates, backups, security and small content changes
- SEO — €300–€800 a month if you take it on, entirely optional
A reasonable total for a small business is somewhere between €50 and €100 a month all in, unless you are running an active SEO campaign.
Questions worth asking before you sign
- Who owns the domain? It should be registered in your business name, and you should have the login.
- What happens if I want to leave? You should be able to take the site elsewhere.
- Who writes the copy? If the answer is “you do”, budget several weekends, or expect the project to stall.
- Is the price fixed? Hourly billing on a fixed-scope website project rarely works in the client’s favour.
- What are the monthly costs, in total, in year two? Get it in writing.
- Can I see something you built for a business like mine? Not a portfolio of unrelated work.
A reasonable way to think about it
If your average job is worth €2,000 and your website brings in one extra job a month, a €2,500 site pays for itself in six weeks and keeps producing for years.
If your average job is worth €80, the maths is completely different and you should be far more careful about what you spend.
That calculation — not the sticker price — is the thing worth thinking hardest about. Any agency worth working with will run it with you before they quote, and will tell you honestly if the numbers do not stack up.
Our own pricing
We publish ours openly because we do not think you should have to sit through a sales call to find out what a website costs. Builds start at €495 outright, or €59 a month if you would rather spread it, with a fixed price agreed in writing before anything begins.
The one thing worth understanding about the monthly option — ours or anyone else’s — is what happens to the source code. On our monthly plans it stays with us and you licence the site while you subscribe; buy the build outright and it is yours to take anywhere. Neither is wrong, but you should know which one you are signing up to.