Website cost: what you pay to build it, then over three years

What a website costs is decided before the quote, when you write down what the site has to do. That’s the job of the Organisation area: putting your needs in writing, so that every figure you are given describes the same site.

You pay for days of work multiplied by a day rate

Behind every figure there is a number of working days and a day rate. For a simple brochure site, Codeur.com, a French freelance marketplace, counts two to four days from a webmaster charging 280 to 400 euros a day, so about 1,000 euros. That sits at the bottom of the grid published by France Num, the French government’s programme to help small businesses go digital, which puts a brochure site at 900 to 5,000 euros.

The day rate varies far more than that. On the same marketplace, the average day rate shown for a web developer in October 2026 is 135 euros, from 70 euros for a beginner to 210 euros for a senior. On Malt, another freelance platform, a WordPress developer charges an average of 290 euros a day with up to two years’ experience, and 499 euros with fifteen years or more.

Across a whole site, the gap also depends on who does the work. According to estimates published by Indy, a French accounting service for the self-employed, a freelance web designer typically charges 500 to 1,500 euros for a brochure site and 1,500 to 5,000 euros for an online shop, while a professional site built by an agency costs 2,000 to 10,000 euros.

For the same number of days, the price can therefore triple depending on who you hire. The number of days, for its part, depends on what the site has to do.

What the site has to do sets the number of days

France Num’s grid rises with what you ask of the site: 500 to 2,000 euros for a one-page site, 3,000 to 10,000 euros for an online shop, 5,000 to 10,000 euros for an online platform.

Within a single category, the range still varies fivefold: 900 to 5,000 euros for a brochure site. Three questions set the number of days, and each supplier answers them in their own way if nobody has answered them first.

• The scope: the number of pages, the features (booking, customer area, payment) and the tools the site has to exchange data with, such as your CRM, the software where you track your customers, or your ERP, the software you run the business on.
• What already exists: an old site to take over, content to move, a domain name to recover.
• The standard you expect: a site that is fast, accessible to every visitor and kept up to date takes more work than one that merely displays.

The rest of the gap comes from what each quote counts or leaves out: content, hosting, the domain name, maintenance. Two website quotes can only be compared if they answer the same written brief, which is why the requirements document weighs more on the final price than the choice of supplier.

AI doesn’t halve the cost of a website

A site built by AI in minutes, a quote cut in half thanks to it: the promise comes up often, and it mixes up two things. AI writes code and text quickly, but code is rarely the most expensive part of a website. The cost lies elsewhere: deciding what the site has to do, gathering the right content, connecting it to your tools, checking what comes out, keeping it up to date.

On the code itself, the gain has been measured. Three field experiments run inside companies and published by Microsoft Research, covering 4,867 developers, show 26% more tasks completed, with larger gains among the less experienced. At Google, a controlled trial with 96 engineers cut the time spent on a complex task by about 21%. The 2025 DORA report, from the same company, finds that 90% of the professionals surveyed use AI at work, and now links its adoption to higher delivery throughput.

That gain is more fragile than it looks. In 2025, the research institute METR had sixteen experienced developers work through 246 real tasks from their own projects: with AI they took 19% longer, while believing they had been 20% faster. In February 2026, the same institute judged it likely that developers are now faster than it had estimated a year earlier.

The gain is also paid for elsewhere:

• The same DORA report still links AI adoption to lower delivery stability, and 30% of respondents have little or no trust in the code it produces.
• In its 2026 report, Faros AI, which makes a tool for measuring how engineering teams work, sees median code review time up 441%. When teams move from low to high AI adoption, the probability that a change causes a production incident more than triples.
• Veracode, a security software company, gave more than a hundred AI models 80 programming tasks chosen because they are prone to known security weaknesses: the code works, but it introduces a security flaw in 45% of cases.

For a simple site you build yourself, the time really does drop: at Wix, which promotes AI-assisted site building, the average time to publish a site fell from eight days to four between 2025 and 2026. AI site builders lower the cost of getting started, but they don’t shorten the scoping or the writing of the content.

So the gain on code is real, but it is paid for in review, fixes and security, and code is only part of what a website costs. None of this halves the price.

We use AI in our own production, and we say so. It takes on the repetitive work and gives us time back; that gain shows up in lead times and in the scope we cover, not in discounts. What we hand it and what we keep is set out in how we work.

If a quote claims a lower price thanks to AI, ask what has disappeared from the scope: scoping, content writing, review, testing or maintenance.

Over three years, maintenance can cost more than the build

A site keeps costing money once it’s live. Neocamino, which France Num points to on this question, publishes these orders of magnitude: 10 to 50 euros a year for the domain name, 3 to 100 euros a month for hosting, and 25 to 500 euros a month to maintain a brochure site, depending on its size and complexity.

Over three years, that maintenance comes to 900 to 18,000 euros, against 900 to 5,000 euros for the build. At the bottom of the range the two are level. At the top, maintenance costs more than three times the build.

Many businesses spend very little. In the 2025 study of French businesses online (“Réussir avec le web”) by Afnic, the association that runs .fr domain names, 66% of those surveyed spend less than 300 euros a year on their online presence, and only 38% apply security patches regularly, down from 41% a year earlier.

Yet a site built on a CMS, a content management system installed with a hosting company, needs regular care, starting with those security updates, which is what maintenance means. The pace of vulnerabilities explains why. Patchstack, a WordPress security company, recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities in WordPress, its plugins and its themes in 2025, 42% more than in 2024. Of those, 46% had no fix when they were disclosed, and the most attacked ones are exploited at scale within a median of five hours.

So count the cost of a site over three years, not at delivery. With us, maintenance is a monthly subscription you choose and can cancel, never a condition of the site itself.

What a low price often leaves out

Make sure you own your site and its domain name. Copyright is the reason: under French law, commissioning a creative work does not transfer the rights in it (Article L111-1 of the Intellectual Property Code), and every right assigned must be listed separately in the contract (Article L131-3).

A low quote that says nothing about assigning the rights, accounts in your name or handing over the code puts those questions off until the day you want to change supplier. What they cost then is what a reversibility clause settles in advance.

If you already have a site, a website audit measures what it’s worth before you decide to pay for another.

Why we don’t publish prices

We don’t sell services from a catalogue. Every quote follows from scoping, because that’s the only way to give you an estimate that holds. The quote covers deliverables, not days, and it doesn’t move along the way unless you change the scope.

We’re not the cheapest option, and we’re not trying to be.