October 08, 2026
A 5 to 10 page business website in India costs roughly 10,000 to 40,000 rupees from a freelancer, 40,000 to 1,50,000 from a small studio, and 1,50,000 to 5,00,000 or more from an agency that also plans the content and the search strategy. The range is that wide because "a website" can mean a five page brochure on a bought theme or a fifty page product catalogue with a calculator, a download centre and a CRM connection, and both arrive in our inbox described as "a website".
About 1,300 people a month type "website development cost in India" into Google, and most of the answers they find are one number. One number tells you nothing until you know three things about the site: who is building it, how much of it is designed for you rather than bought, and what it has to connect to.
This article goes through those three, then through the things that push a quote from the bottom of a band to the top, then the running costs most quotes leave out. The bands are market figures from what we see in quotes across Gujarat and the rest of India. They are not our price list; we quote a fixed price per project after a written brief.
Who builds it sets the band.
A freelancer working alone charges roughly 10,000 to 40,000 rupees for a small business site, usually on WordPress or a page builder with a purchased theme. You get a working site quickly and cheaply. You usually don't get a design phase, a written scope, or anyone to call when the freelancer takes a job in Pune.
A small studio with a designer and a developer charges roughly 40,000 to 1,50,000. The site is designed before it is built, the structure is decided for your business rather than inherited from a theme, and there is normally a document that says what is included.
An agency that also writes the content, plans the site around search, shoots the photography and runs the project charges roughly 1,50,000 to 5,00,000 and above. You're paying for several disciplines at once and for someone to manage them.
The second thing is how much is designed for you. A theme takes days to set up. A custom design takes weeks, because someone has to decide the structure, draw every screen at phone and desktop widths, and then build those screens from scratch. That is where the gap between the freelancer band and the studio band comes from.
The third is what the site connects to. A contact form that sends you an email is a morning's work. A form that writes into Zoho, sends a WhatsApp acknowledgement to the customer and logs the lead in a Google Sheet is a week's work, with accounts to set up and cases to test. Each integration moves the quote, and a quote that doesn't name them is guessing.
Design and development are different jobs, and many quotes hide one inside the other. If you're comparing prices, find out which you are looking at.
Design is the thinking and the drawing: what pages exist, what each one has to do, where the enquiry button sits, what the type and colour system is, how the whole thing behaves on a phone. Done properly it produces a Figma file with every screen at two or three widths, a design system of reusable components, and a clickable prototype you can put in front of a colleague before any code exists.
For a focused 5 to 10 page site we plan 2 to 4 weeks of design and a similar stretch of development. The time splits roughly evenly, and the cost follows the time.
On the freelancer band, design usually doesn't exist as a separate step. The theme is the design. That's fine for a business that needs a presence and has nothing complicated to explain, and it's why that band is cheap. It stops being fine when the product needs explaining: a switch that pairs with an app, a solar module with a datasheet per series, a tile that comes in eleven sizes. A theme has no page for that, so the developer improvises, and the improvisation is what you pay to replace two years later.
Ask each quote whether design is a separate phase with its own deliverable. If the answer is "we'll show you the site when it's ready", there is no design cost because there is no design.
Development charges scale with the number of distinct page types, not the number of pages.
A ten page site with a home, an about page, four service pages, a contact page and three others has perhaps five templates, because the four service pages share one. That's why a 10 page site and a 25 page site built on the same templates cost nearly the same, and why a 6 page site with six unrelated layouts can cost more than either.
Within the studio band, the position works like this. A site with four to six templates, a form and no integrations sits near the bottom. A site with a product catalogue managed from an admin panel, filters, and a download centre for datasheets sits in the upper half. Once the site needs a second language, a calculator, a dealer locator, a login for customers or an online payment, it moves to the top of the studio band or into the agency band, because every one of those is a small application on its own. A store with a real catalogue and payments is a different product again with its own bands, and article 02 covers those.
The admin panel is the line to look for. A site where you can change text, images and prices yourself costs more to build than one where the developer edits the code, and it pays that back in the first year of changes. Ask what you will be able to edit without calling anyone.
A designed 10 page site takes 3 to 5 weeks to build and test in our experience. If a quote promises a designed site in a week, it's a theme with your logo on it, and the price should say so.
There are three ways to buy a site in India and they aren't competing for the same job.
A builder such as Wix or the tool your hosting company sells is a monthly subscription and your own evenings. Nobody designs anything; you pick a template and fill it in. It's the right answer for a one person practice that needs an address on the internet by Friday. The catch is ownership: stop paying and the site is gone, and you can't move it to another host.
A freelancer is the cheapest way to have someone else do the work, and the good ones are excellent value for a simple site. The risk is continuity rather than quality: one person, one laptop, and when they move on your site's only expert has moved on too. Whoever builds it, get the source code and the hosting login in your own name on day one.
A web design company charges more because more than one discipline is involved and someone is accountable for the whole thing. What you should get for the difference: a written brief before the quote, design as its own phase, a fixed price, ownership of every file, and a person who still answers in two years.
For reference, this is how a project runs with us: a conversation, then a short written brief we prepare, then a fixed quote with a timeline. Nothing starts until you have both. The same people who write the brief design the screens and build them. At handover you own the Figma files, the design system, the prototype, the source code, the hosting and every credential in your own name, and you can take all of it to any other developer.
Six things, in roughly the order they show up on invoices.
Page types. Every new layout is a design and a build. A site with a product template, a blog template and a case study template carries three sites' worth of decisions.
Content. If you supply finished text and photographs, the site costs less and launches sooner. If the studio has to write forty product descriptions, interview your sales team and shoot the factory, that is a second project on top of the first, and on agency quotes it can be a large share of the bill.
Integrations. Payments, a CRM, Tally, a WhatsApp Business API connection, Google Workspace login, a courier API. Each has documentation, an account, a sandbox and edge cases, and each adds days.
Languages. A second language means a second set of every page, plus hreflang tags and, for Arabic, a mirrored right-to-left layout. Budget for it as its own line.
Speed and search work. A site built to pass Core Web Vitals on a phone over a throttled connection, with responsive WebP images and structured data, takes longer than one that merely loads. Ask whether the quote includes speed testing before launch; most don't.
Revisions. Two rounds of design changes are normal and should be in the price. An open ended "until you're happy" is either priced high to cover it or will turn into an argument.
Hire a developer directly when you already have a design, or when the job is technical and defined: connect this form to that CRM, build this calculator, fix this speed problem. Most of the 90 or so people a month who search "hire web developer india" are in that position. Pay by the day or by the deliverable, and get the rate in writing first.
Hire a studio when nobody has decided what the site should be yet. That decision is the expensive one to get wrong, because everything else is built on it. A developer will build what you ask for; a studio will first ask whether it's the right thing to ask for.
Either way, three conditions belong in the agreement: the code and the hosting are in your name, the design files are handed over, and the price is fixed before work starts.
Running costs for a business site in India are small but not zero, and they are the numbers most quotes leave out.
A domain is roughly 800 to 1,500 rupees a year. Shared hosting is roughly 3,000 to 15,000 a year; the range depends on traffic, storage and whether the host is any good, and a site with a large admin panel or real traffic may need a VPS above that. SSL is free with Let's Encrypt on most hosts, or 1,000 to 10,000 a year for a paid certificate, which most small sites don't need. A maintenance plan for updates, backups and fixes runs roughly 1,000 to 10,000 a month.
The wide range on maintenance is about what it covers. At the bottom it's a backup and a security patch. At the top it's a person who changes your prices, adds a product and answers the same day. We set hosting up in the client's own name and offer a monthly plan for updates, backups and fixes; the price depends on what the plan has to include. Article 06 goes through the yearly bill line by line.
Two of our own builds show how far apart two "websites" can be.
Atal Solar makes n-type TOPCon solar modules. Their site has a page per product series with the full electrical and mechanical specification, a download centre for datasheets and certificates, a solar calculator for homeowners, sections on quality, technology and reliability, a blog built on questions people actually search, a careers page and enquiry handling. That is a catalogue, a calculator, a document library and a lead system on one domain. It sits well up the scale for the reasons above: many page types, a lot of managed content, and tools that had to be built rather than installed.
Dayro India makes smart switches, knobs and controllers. The brief there was to show the physical switch and the app together on the same product page, with 3D visuals. Fewer page types than Atal Solar, but each product page carried more design effort, because the product only makes sense when you see the hardware and the screen side by side.
Both are on our portfolio with the three phone responsive build image, so you can see what the work looks like. If you want a fixed quote for your own site, the start a project form on our contact page asks the questions we need to write the brief.
Roughly 10,000 to 40,000 rupees from a freelancer on a theme, or the lower part of the 40,000 to 1,50,000 studio band if it is designed first. The lower figure buys a themed presence; the higher one buys a site built around what you sell.
Yes, when the job is simple and you own the code and the domain. It stops being worth it when the site has to explain a product, feed leads into a system or rank for anything, because the rebuild costs more than doing it once.
You are paying for more than one discipline, a written brief before the quote, and someone accountable for the whole thing. Whether that's worth the difference depends on how much your site has to do.
Page count and page types, whether design is a separate phase, the number of revision rounds, integrations by name, who supplies the content, what is checked before launch, and a line that says code, hosting and design files are yours.
For a focused 5 to 10 page site, 2 to 4 weeks of design and a similar stretch of development, so 4 to 8 weeks if content arrives on time. Content is the usual cause of delay.
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