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How much does a custom website cost in 2026?

Brochure, e-commerce, SaaS: a transparent breakdown of what a hand-coded site costs in 2026, no templates, no no-code.

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It's the first question every executive asks an agency: how much does it cost? And it's also the worst-handled. Most agencies answer with a range so wide it's useless — "between $2,000 and $50,000" — or a misleading floor price that only covers part of the actual scope.

At SARO Agency, we hand-code every site, in France, by CTI-certified engineers. Our pricing grid is public and transparent. This guide explains what you actually pay for, and why.

A custom website is not a visual deliverable — it's a software product. The price you're charged is the cost of the code and engineering that hold the product together over time.

What you pay for when you pay for a website

The price of a custom site covers four things, in very different proportions depending on the project:

  1. Conception — UX, user journeys, information architecture
  2. Visual design — guidelines, mockups, micro-interactions
  3. Development — front-end and back-end code, integrations
  4. Production — hosting, deployment, monitoring

On a $1,500 WordPress site, those four lines are compressed into a generic, pre-existing theme. It works, but it looks like thousands of others, loads poorly, and degrades every time a plugin updates. On a custom site, those four lines are rebuilt to fit your use case — and that's what justifies the difference in price.

To understand the philosophy behind that choice, read our manifesto: why we hand-code every site, without templates.

Custom brochure site: 6,500 to 12,000€ ex. VAT

Our floor price for a professional brochure site is 6,500€ ex. VAT. That covers:

  • 4 to 7 personalized pages (home, about, services, contact, mandatory legal pages)
  • Responsive design (desktop + tablet + mobile), hand-coded
  • Structural SEO optimization (semantic HTML, Schema.org structured data, per-page metadata, sitemap, hreflang for multilingual)
  • Native performance: Core Web Vitals in the green (LCP < 2.5s, INP < 200ms, CLS < 0.1) without a cache plugin to maintain
  • GDPR-compliant contact form, transactional mail integration
  • Sovereign hosting in France, 24/7 monitoring, SSL certificate, automated backups

From there, the price scales with the depth of the site. An extended brochure (10-15 pages, blog, multilingual, calendar or third-party integrations) lands between 9,000 and 12,000€ ex. VAT.

What makes the price vary:

  • Number of unique pages — each custom page demands conception + mockup + integration
  • Multilingual — FR/EN/AR triples configuration and proofreading work, around +25%
  • Integrations — Calendly, Mailchimp, Stripe, Yousign, etc.: each API adds 1 to 3 days of development
  • Design — if you provide the mockup, it's included; if we design it, expect +25% of dev cost, floor 1,500€

E-commerce site: 13,500 to 30,000€ ex. VAT

An e-commerce site is, technically, several orders of magnitude above a brochure. You don't sell a product online with a contact-form page. You need:

  • A structured product catalog (variants, stock, multiple prices, taxes)
  • A persistent cart
  • A secure payment funnel (Stripe, Mollie or equivalent)
  • Order management on the admin side (statuses, invoices, shipping, returns)
  • VAT and invoicing compliance (in France, this is non-negotiable)
  • Often: a customer account, order tracking, returns module, blog

Our entry price for a complete e-commerce is 13,500€ ex. VAT over 24 monthly installments — about 565€/month. That includes everything above plus hosting, maintenance and 24/7 support.

For an e-commerce with a large catalog (>200 products), multi-warehouse management, or ERP/CRM integrations, count between 20,000 and 30,000€ ex. VAT depending on scope.

Shopify Plus starts at around 24,000€/year in licensing alone, excluding development, custom theme, third-party apps (each app between 10 and 200€/month). Over three years, a moderately customized Shopify Plus costs more than a custom SARO e-commerce — and it leaves you with the technical debt of a theme that will be obsolete at the platform's next refresh.

SaaS and business platform: starting at 18,000€ ex. VAT

Beyond the website, many companies need a real business tool — a custom back-office, a customer portal, a marketplace platform, a B2B SaaS. There, we're talking software, not websites.

Our SaaS projects start at 18,000€ ex. VAT and have no ceiling — a six-month, 80,000€ ex. VAT project is entirely common. What determines the price:

  • Number of user roles (admin, client, partner, etc. — each with its own permissions)
  • Business complexity (a 3-KPI dashboard vs a 7-step approval workflow)
  • Critical integrations (third-party APIs, ERP, CRM, e-signature, transactional mail)
  • Scalability needs (10 internal users vs 10,000 public users)

A well-scoped SaaS project starts with a specification phase (1 to 3 weeks, 3,000 to 8,000€ ex. VAT) that doesn't commit you to anything afterwards. It's the only honest way to estimate a software project.

Why a 1,500€ site isn't actually saving money

The argument is tempting: why pay 6,500€ for what a junior freelancer or a WordPress theme would do for 1,500€? Here are the hidden costs you'll pay instead:

  • Degraded performance: an average WordPress theme loads 30 to 80 requests on first paint. A custom site typically loads 5 to 15. On mobile over 4G, that's a 4 to 7 second difference. It's measurable directly in Search Console: an LCP > 4s cuts your chances of ranking on competitive keywords.
  • Fragile security: every third-party plugin is a potential attack vector. WordPress powers 43% of the world's sites and concentrates 96% of CMS attacks. A custom site doesn't have that exposure surface.
  • Maintenance deferred, not avoided: plugin updates, PHP updates, and WordPress core updates regularly break pre-built themes. You pay a freelancer 500-1,500€ every 12-18 months to fix what was working before.
  • No code ownership: with a theme, you rent a product. With a custom site, you own the source code. At any moment, you can switch agency or take over yourself if you have a technical team.

Over 5 years, the total cost of ownership gap between a 1,500€ WordPress and a 6,500€ custom site is generally favorable to custom. And that's without counting the revenue lost to performance.

How to estimate your project

Rather than asking for a generic quote, the most efficient path is to configure your project line by line. Our quote configurator lets you check exactly the features you need and get a personalized price in real time — no hidden fields, no surprise variations, no mandatory sales call before you see a number.

The quote it produces is firm and non-revisable. If you decide to move forward, one of our engineers reaches out within 24 hours for a technical conversation. No forced scoping, no consulting bullshit.

That's our version of transparency: you know exactly what you're buying and what it costs, before the first meeting.