A premium website in 2026 costs between €8,000 and €20,000 for a boutique-studio build, scaling to €75,000+ for full agency engagements. Anything under €3,000 is a template. Anything between is a senior freelancer.
The price is mostly people-hours, not software. Where the hours go — strategy, design, engineering, QA — is what separates a site that earns its money back in a quarter from one that quietly loses you visitors for two years.
The most common question on a discovery call is also the one most agencies dodge: how much. The dodging is understandable. Pricing in web design is genuinely confusing because the same five-word brief, “we need a new website,” can plausibly cost €500 or €500,000. Both prices are real. Both deliver something the buyer might call a website. The work behind each is almost unrecognisable as the same craft.
This is the breakdown we wish every founder had before they started shortlisting. Honest tiers, honest hour counts, honest hidden costs, and the math that tells you which tier you actually need.
What you are paying for, before we talk about tiers
A website's price tag is roughly 80% people-hours. The other 20% is tooling, hosting, licenses, and occasionally photography or video commissions. So when someone quotes you €15,000, the question is not what software they use. The question is: how many hours, by whom, on what.
Inside those hours, the buckets are predictable:
- Strategy and discovery. Understanding your business, your customer, your funnel, and the one job the site needs to do above all others. The cheaper the project, the smaller this bucket. At the bottom of the market it does not exist.
- Design. Information architecture, wireframes, visual design, motion, asset production. The most visible cost. Also the easiest to compare across portfolios.
- Engineering. Build, integrations, CMS work, performance optimisation. Where premium and non-premium diverge sharply — cheap sites skip half of this.
- Quality assurance and launch. Cross-device testing, performance audits, analytics instrumentation, content QA, accessibility checks. The work nobody pays for, except the buyer who knows what they are doing.
Now the tiers.
Tier 1 — Under €3,000: templates and template-customisers
This is the bottom of the market and there is no shame in it. Most founders should start here.
You are buying a Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, or Framer template that someone has lightly customised. The work is forty hours or fewer. There is no strategy session, no positioning work, no original design. The deliverable is a professional-looking site that does the basics: tells visitors who you are, what you do, and how to contact you.
What you get well: a clean launch, fast turnaround (one to three weeks), low risk.
What you do not get: a site designed around your conversion funnel, original visual identity, or any honest answer to the question “why is this layout, not that one.” The template made those decisions for you, in the abstract, two years ago, for a generic business.
Right tier for: very early-stage founders who need professional credibility and nothing more. Bootstrapped service businesses. MVPs that will be rebuilt once revenue justifies it.
Tier 2 — €3,000 to €8,000: senior freelancers and junior studios
Now we are buying labour, not licences. One designer-developer, or a duo, working on a customised template or a light custom build. The hours roughly double, somewhere between 60 and 120, and the strategy bucket appears for the first time — usually one workshop and a positioning document.
What you get well: a site that looks bespoke, has some thought behind structure, and accommodates your specific funnel within reason. The visible polish jumps noticeably above tier 1.
What you do not get: rigorous performance optimisation, original design language, post-launch instrumentation, or accountability for the numbers. The freelancer ships the site and moves to the next project.
Right tier for: service businesses doing under €500k a year. Solo consultants with strong personal brands. E-commerce stores selling under twenty SKUs.
Tier 3 — €8,000 to €20,000: the boutique studio
This is where craft and strategy compound, and where the word premium starts meaning something concrete. A small senior team, usually two to four people, all of them designing and building. The hours land between 180 and 350. Strategy gets two to three weeks. Engineering gets dedicated performance work. Analytics gets instrumented from day one.
This is the tier we work in at Elypt, and we think it is the sweet spot for most serious founders. Here is why.
Below this tier, the work is necessarily generic, because the hours do not exist to make it specific. Above this tier, you are paying for process overhead — account managers, project coordinators, multiple review cycles. The output gets safer, not better.
What you get well: original design built around your actual funnel, performance you can verify (90+ on Lighthouse desktop, 80+ on mobile), code and assets you own outright, instrumentation that lets you read the numbers post-launch, a website that does not need a rebuild in 18 months.
What you do not get: seven-figure brand systems, dedicated account management, ten-page proposals. The deliverable is a working site, not a deck about a site.
Right tier for: founders doing €500k to €10M annually, where the website is a genuine sales channel. Service businesses, professional firms, premium e-commerce, hospitality, interior design, architecture studios, high-end consultancies.
Sitting between tier 2 and tier 3 and not sure which is the right call? That is what our 30-minute discovery calls are for.
Book a call →Tier 4 — €20,000 to €75,000: established agencies
Larger teams, more layers, more process. Account managers, art directors, multiple designers, multiple engineers, project coordinators, sometimes external content writers. Hours easily cross 500, often 700 or more. Timelines stretch to four or six months.
This is genuinely worth it when the work is genuinely complex: multi-site systems, large e-commerce platforms with hundreds of SKUs, multi-language platforms, design systems that span dozens of templates, integrations with custom backend services.
It is not worth it when the project is a five-page brochure site. The same site at tier 3 will arrive faster, with less compromise, because fewer hands touched it. At this tier you are paying partly for what the work delivers, and partly for organisational complexity that the work itself does not need.
Right tier for: mid-market businesses with multiple stakeholders, enterprise-adjacent SaaS, multi-brand portfolios, businesses with internal procurement processes that require this scale.
Tier 5 — €75,000 and up: enterprise
At this tier the website is itself a piece of the brand. The team building it functions as a partial extension of your in-house creative organisation. Hours go beyond 1,000. Timelines run six to twelve months. There are workshops, brand systems, motion guidelines, illustration libraries, photography commissions, often a custom CMS.
If you are reading this article wondering whether you need tier 5, you almost certainly do not. The businesses that need this tier already have internal heads of marketing who know.
Where the hours actually go (a tier 3 example)
To make this concrete, here is roughly how we spend the hours on a typical €12,000 build. The exact split varies, but the shape holds.
- Discovery and strategy: 25 hours. Numbers review, customer interviews if accessible, positioning, audience definition, decisions about what the site must accomplish, content architecture.
- Wireframes and content structure: 30 hours. Page-by-page wireframes, content flow, conversion path mapping, copy briefs.
- Visual design and motion: 90 hours. Brand alignment, original visual language, motion principles, high-fidelity mockups, interaction prototypes.
- Engineering: 70 hours. Build, integrations, custom interactions, performance optimisation, SEO foundations, accessibility.
- QA, launch, instrumentation: 25 hours. Cross-device testing, performance audits, analytics setup, conversion tracking, content QA.
Total: roughly 240 hours. Across a team of two to three senior people over eight to twelve weeks, that is the work behind a tier 3 number.
The hidden costs founders miss
Beyond the build quote, here is what most founders do not budget for. None of these are huge individually, but they add up.
- Hosting. Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, or comparable. €0 to €40 per month for most premium sites.
- Domain. €10 to €30 per year for a standard TLD. Premium TLDs (.io, .studio) are €30 to €80.
- Email hosting. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. €6 to €12 per user per month.
- Stock photography or commissioned shoots. If the agency does not include it, custom photography starts at €500 and runs to €5,000+. Stock is €30 to €300.
- Custom fonts. If you go beyond Google Fonts or open-source, premium typefaces are €200 to €2,000 per family.
- Ongoing maintenance. Plan for one or two days of work per quarter to keep things current. That is €500 to €2,000 a year depending on tier.
The ROI math, plainly
Here is the conversation we have with every founder who flinches at a tier 3 quote.
If your site currently does €200,000 a year in attributable revenue, a 1% conversion lift adds €2,000 to your top line. A 3% lift adds €6,000. A 10% lift — common when moving from tier 1 to tier 3 — adds €20,000. Per year. Compounded across two or three years before the next rebuild.
This is why the discussion of price is the wrong discussion. The right one is: what is the conversion gap between where you are and where you could be, and how quickly does a better site close it. If your current site is already converting near industry benchmark, you may not need an upgrade. If it is not, the math almost always favours moving up at least one tier.
Three questions to ask before paying any tier
Whatever tier you choose, these three questions will tell you whether you are getting what you are paying for.
1. What am I getting at this tier that I would not at the tier below?
A good agency can answer this in one minute. If the answer is vague — “more attention,” “higher quality” — you are paying for a brand premium, not a craft premium. Walk away.
2. Where does this price come from?
Hours times rate, plus tooling, plus a margin. A premium studio should be able to break this down without resistance. If the answer is “that is just our package,” you are inside a fixed-price product that may or may not match your project. That is not always bad — but you should know.
3. What is the ownership model?
This catches most founders too late. Codebase, design files, content, hosting access, analytics account. All of it should be yours at handover. We cover this in detail in our buyer's guide, but the short version: if anything in the deliverable list is rented rather than owned, you are signing up for a relationship you will eventually want out of.
The honest bottom line
Most founders sitting at €5,000 to €15,000 of budget should stretch up to tier 3 rather than down to tier 2. The difference between those tiers is qualitative, not quantitative. The difference between tier 3 and tier 4, for most businesses, is process overhead they do not need to pay for.
If your current site is leaking visitors and you cannot read your own funnel data, the cost of staying where you are is almost certainly higher than the cost of upgrading. The conversation we want to have on a discovery call is not about our price. It is about your numbers, and whether the gap is worth closing now or later.