Vertex Marketing
What a website costs
This is the first question anyone asks, and it deserves a real answer rather than a contact form. Here is what decides the price, what is always included, and how you get to your number.
The short answer
It depends, and that is not a dodge. A website is not a product with a label on it, it is a quantity of work. A five-page site with a contact form and a store with three hundred products, filters and checkout are not the same thing, in the way that a garage and a house are not the same thing.
What we can do is tell you exactly what moves the number, so you can place yourself roughly before we ever speak. Then one conversation gets you a fixed figure in a written quote.
What pushes the price up
Almost all of it comes down to five things:
- Scope: how many different kinds of page there are. Five similar pages cost less than five that all look and behave differently
- Features: cart and checkout, bookings, user accounts, search and filters, content entered by several people. Every feature is its own piece of work with its own testing
- Content: whether the text and the photographs exist. If we have to write and shoot them, that is separate work, and it is the most underestimated line in most projects
- Languages: a bilingual site is not twice the price, but it is not free either. Macedonian and English with their own URLs and their own Google tags is real additional work
- Connecting to something you already run: accounting, stock, a booking system. If the site has to talk to another program, that program decides the price, not us
What is always included
However large the project, none of this is charged separately, and none of it sits in the quote as a line that can be removed to make the total look smaller:
- custom design for your brand, not a purchased template
- working on every screen, with mobile first rather than adjusted at the end
- the SEO foundation and structured data built into the code from day one
- a content management system you use yourself for text and images, with training before handover
- fast hosting and 30 days of support after launch
What costs extra, and is worth saying out loud
Maintenance after the first 30 days is separate. The domain and certain external services are billed yearly and go straight to them rather than through us. Writing content, photography and video are separate work. New features after launch are a new project, small or large.
We say all of this at the start, because these are the items that leave people feeling cheated, and they are almost never actually cheating. They are things nobody mentioned in time.
Why the cheap site often ends up costing more
The usual sequence goes like this. The site is built cheaply on a template. A year later it is slow, nothing substantial can be changed without an upgrade that costs more than the template did, and it does not show in Google because nobody thought about that at the time. So it gets paid for a second time, and this time it starts from scratch.
We are not saying a cheap site is always the wrong decision. For someone testing an idea it is perfectly sensible. We are saying you should know what you are buying, and that in that case the price of the site is not the final price.
How you get to your number
One conversation, about thirty minutes, no obligation. We want to know what the site has to do, who will be using it, and what already exists. If you already have a site, we look at it before we talk.
Then you get a written quote with a fixed price, exactly what is covered, and how long it takes. The price does not change during the work unless you ask for something new, and when you do, that gets written down before it is built rather than appearing on the final invoice.
The services these prices are for
Ready for an actual number?
Tell us what you need. We answer with questions, not with a form.
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