Website development cost in India (2026): prices, running costs and how to compare quotes

Ask five Indian agencies to quote for the same five-page website and you can get five answers between ₹5,000 and ₹1.5 lakh. None of them is necessarily lying. They're quoting for different things, and most of them never tell you which thing.

We build websites for a living and our prices are public, so we spend a lot of time explaining the gap between a cheap quote and a sensible one. The numbers below were checked on 30 September 2026.

Why quotes for the same website vary so much

Even the agencies and hosting companies that publish price lists can't agree on what a "basic website" costs:

The spread comes down to five decisions, each of which changes how much work the site takes.

1. Template or custom design. A ₹5,000 site is usually a bought theme with your logo and text dropped in. A custom design means someone plans each page around what your customers need to see.
2. Who writes the words. Many quotes assume you supply every line of copy. Zethic quotes ₹20,000 to ₹60,000 just to write a 10-page site properly, which is why cheap quotes tend to leave it out.
3. How many different page layouts there are. Ten pages that share one layout take far less effort than five pages that each need their own.
4. What the site has to connect to: payment gateways, booking tools, CRMs, WhatsApp, inventory. Each integration is a small project of its own.
5. Whether anyone measures what happens after launch. Form and WhatsApp tracking, analytics and ad pixels take a day or two to do properly. If a quote doesn't mention them, assume they aren't included.

When two quotes differ by ₹50,000, look for the difference in those five lines first, and ask each agency to confirm in writing which of them they're doing.

Website development cost in India by type (2026)

These are the ranges Indian agencies and hosting companies publish. Treat them as a map of the market rather than a quote: your scope decides where you land.

On a landing page, the gap between a cheap quote and a costly one is mostly tracking and load speed, which a page built for paid traffic needs and a brochure page doesn't. Anything that sells online also keeps costing money every month, which we add up further down.

How much does a 5-page website cost in India?

Zethic puts a basic 5 to 10 page business site at ₹30,000 to ₹80,000, and GoDaddy India puts a 1 to 10 page site at ₹40,000 to ₹1,00,000. Akoode puts a clean five-page WordPress site with a blog at ₹25,000 to ₹40,000.

Zethic adds a warning worth taking seriously: anything below ₹80,000 "typically indicates a template installation with limited customization", and it puts a professionally built business site at ₹80,000 to ₹2,00,000. Copywriting for 10 pages adds ₹20,000 to ₹60,000 on its figures.

Below ₹15,000 you're almost certainly buying a theme, not a design. That can be the right call for a new business that needs a presence this month. Expect to replace it once the business starts depending on the website for leads.

What you pay every year after launch

None of the cost guides we read adds up the second year. These costs carry on after launch:

What a maintenance plan should cover, and what Indian providers charge for one, is in our website maintenance cost guide.

A worked example

Take a business website quoted at ₹65,000, with everything below shown before GST:

• Build: ₹65,000, once.
• .com domain: ₹399 in year one, then ₹1,599 a year.
• Hosting: around ₹3,000 a year.
• Maintenance at 15% of the build: about ₹9,750 a year.

Year one comes to roughly ₹78,000 and every year after that to around ₹14,000, so about ₹1.35 lakh over five years. If the agency is GST-registered, add 18% to the build and to most of the rest.

Run the same sum on a ₹6,000 package with a ₹3,000 yearly renewal and five years cost about ₹18,000 before GST. That is still far cheaper. The catch is whether a site at that price brings in enough enquiries to be worth having.

Template, WordPress, Shopify or custom: which one is worth paying for?

Our view: if you sell physical products and have fewer than a few hundred of them, start on Shopify. A custom store only makes sense once Shopify's fees or limits start costing you money. If your website exists to bring in enquiries from ads and search, a custom build earns its cost back through speed and tracking.

You can edit a template, WordPress or Shopify site yourself. A custom build is only editable if a CMS is part of the quote. On the first three, page speed depends on the theme, plugins or apps; on a custom build you control everything that loads.

What makes a website worth what you paid

Price tells you very little about whether a site will perform. These four checks tell you a lot, and you can run all of them before paying the final instalment.

It loads fast on a phone

Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Red numbers on a new website mean the work isn't finished. Google's Core Web Vitals set the bar: main content visible within 2.5 seconds (LCP), a response to a tap within 200 milliseconds (INP) and a layout shift score of 0.1 or less (CLS).

Google measures those on real visitors, separately for mobile and desktop. A brand-new site won't have that data yet, so PageSpeed Insights shows lab measurements until real traffic builds up.

Every enquiry is tracked

Form submissions, WhatsApp clicks and phone taps should all show up in Google Analytics 4 as events you can count. If you plan to run ads, the Meta Pixel and Google Ads conversion tags should be installed and tested too. Without this you can't tell which ₹10,000 of ad spend produced customers. Our guide to WhatsApp lead tracking shows what a complete setup looks like.

Search engines can read it

Each page needs its own title and description, the site needs a sitemap submitted to Google Search Console, and your business details should be marked up with structured data. None of this is advanced SEO. It's cheap to do during the build and annoying to retrofit.

You own it

You should have admin access to the domain, the hosting, the analytics and, for a custom build, the code. A site you can't move is a site you rent.

How to compare website quotes: 8 questions to ask

1. Is this a custom design or a theme? If a theme, which one, and can I see its demo?
2. How many unique page layouts are included, and what does an extra page cost?
3. Who writes the content, and who sources the photos?
4. Is the price inclusive of GST?
5. What will I pay in year two, item by item?
6. Will the domain, hosting and analytics accounts be in my name?
7. Which tracking is included: forms, WhatsApp, calls, Meta Pixel, Google Ads?
8. What happens if something breaks three months after launch?

An agency that can't answer these clearly in writing is guessing at your project. That usually shows up later as extra invoices.

What we charge for websites

We publish fixed starting prices because hidden pricing hurts buyers. A landing page is ₹12,500 and takes one to two weeks. A business website of up to 8 pages is ₹32,500 and takes three to five weeks, with design, an SEO foundation, lead forms and analytics included, plus three months of fixes after launch. Custom e-commerce starts at ₹75,000 and takes five to eight weeks, and custom web apps or MVPs start at ₹1,75,000.

Add-ons are priced openly too: a blog module is ₹6,000, an editable CMS ₹10,000 and each extra language ₹7,500. We don't sell template packages, and if Shopify is the better fit for your catalogue, we'll say so. We build in React, which lets us keep pages light and wire every form and WhatsApp click into analytics.

You can build an estimate in a minute on our pricing page, or read what goes into a build on the website design and development page. If you already have quotes from other agencies, send them over. We're happy to tell you what each one does and doesn't include, even if you don't hire us.