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How much does a website cost: the 2026 brackets
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A website in Italy costs between €800 and €8,000 as a project, depending on what it has to do, and considerably more if it's an online shop. On a monthly fee you'll find anything from a few tens of euros to a few hundred. I only build sites as an ongoing relationship, with no minimum term, and I quote for the case in front of me: it depends on how many pages you need, in how many languages, and what the site has to do. I explain why I work this way further down.
Below is where that range comes from, what actually moves it, and what you pay every year once the site is live. With figures.
The market brackets, in one table
These are the orders of magnitude you'll find in Italy today for a site built by a professional.
| Type of site | Market price | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Single page (landing) | €400 – 1,500 | 3-5 days |
| Brochure site, 5-8 pages | €800 – 3,500 | 1-3 weeks |
| Business site, 10+ pages | €2,500 – 8,000 | 3-6 weeks |
| Online shop, simple catalogue | €3,000 – 7,000 | 4-8 weeks |
| Structured online shop | €7,000 – 20,000 | 2-6 months |
For the same work I don't publish a rate: I quote for the case, because two ten-page sites can be two very different jobs. What is fixed is everything else: a monthly fee, no minimum term, and each extra language as its own line. How we start is something we look at together, on your case.
My reference is a site of around 10 pages. For the online shop further down, the reference is a catalogue of around 30 products: those are the two typical scopes, and they’re what makes a number comparable at all.
See what it covers in your case
Answer and see what changes. The price depends on the same answers, and I tell you when we talk.
What you need
In how many languages
Copy and photos
Your case
Quote made to fit
Direct phone support included: a number you can call, and I pick up.
Figures based on a site of around 10 pages.
Every month: domain, hosting, certificate, backups and updates included, plus 4 to 8 hours to change the site, edits, new pages, development.
The fee has no end date: it carries on for as long as you need it.
With copy and photos ready you sit at the bottom of the bracket: it’s the heaviest item after the decisions that have to be made from scratch.
It’s an estimate, not a quote: the exact number comes after seeing what there is to do.
Let’s talk about your caseWhy the same site can cost €3,000 or €15,000
I've watched two hotels ask for a site with the same number of pages and get quotes twelve thousand euros apart. Neither of them was wrong.
The reason is that "a fifteen-page site" doesn't describe a piece of work. It describes a container. Inside it you might find a site where the copy already exists, the photos too, and it's a matter of putting them in order, or one where what to say has to be worked out from scratch, a photo shoot has to be organised, and the booking system and channel manager have to be wired in. Two different trades that go by the same name.
So the price moves on two things, and only two:
How much there is to do. How many decisions have to be made from nothing, how much content has to be produced, how many external systems have to be made to talk to each other.
How much of it can be optimised. That is, how much of that work can be done with things that already exist, instead of starting from a blank page every time. I come back to this further down, because it's the half of the answer you think about least when you're looking at a quote.
What pushes the price up, in order of weight
Here they are in the order in which they actually matter, which isn't the order they're usually presented in.
1. How much has to be decided from scratch. The heaviest item and the least visible. If you already know what you want to say and to whom, it gets built. If that has to be worked out first, the time goes somewhere.
2. Producing the content. Copy, photos, video, translation. A professional shoot costs €800-2,000 a day, individual bespoke photos €300-1,000. It's also the item most often left outside the scope of a quote, because copy and photos are usually assumed to come from the client: on its own it explains much of the gap between €2,000 and €20,000.
3. The number of languages. Not a translation done once: content that has to be written, optimised, checked and then maintained forever, in every language. Figures below.
4. Integrations with external systems. ERP, CRM, payments, invoicing, and for anyone letting rooms the PMS, the channel manager, the booking engine. The time doesn't go into connecting them: it goes into making them work even when the other end behaves oddly.
5. How many people approve. A single decision-maker with two rounds of revisions costs structurally less than four stakeholders with open-ended revisions. It's one of the few levers you control directly, and it's worth more than it looks.
6. Design. It counts, but less than people say: a bespoke design is worth one or two thousand euros more. It's a delta, not the thing separating a €3,000 site from a €20,000 one.
7. What happens after launch. Two identical-looking quotes can contain zero support hours and eight hours a month respectively. It's the item that makes two numbers not comparable, and it's worth finding in both quotes before putting them side by side.
Monthly fee or one-off payment: what actually changes
I only sell the site on a monthly fee. I'm keeping the comparison anyway, because a one-off quote is what you'll be offered elsewhere and it helps to know how to read it: it isn't the cheap version of the fee, it buys something else.
| One-off payment | Monthly fee | |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum term | none | none |
| After handover | the relationship ends there | carries on, no end date |
| Domain, hosting, backups, updates | down to you | included |
| Hours included for changes | none | 4-8 a month |
| Direct phone support | not included | included |
| If something breaks | quoted separately | already in |
The criterion is simpler than it looks. If you already have the content, you'll use the site as a business card and you don't expect to touch it often, the one-off is the right call: in that case I'm not the right person, and I'll tell you in the first conversation rather than in the third month. If instead the site has to collect enquiries, sell, rank, and there's something to change every month, then you need someone looking at it.
That is why I stopped selling the one-off. Not because it earned less: because handing a site over and disappearing is the opposite of what I'm good at. On the monthly fee there's a number you can call and I pick up, and every month there are hours already paid for to change what needs changing. My goal isn't to hand you a site, it's to grow it alongside your business, and that is measured over time, not on handover day.
I've written about it at length on the page about how I work, and in why it pays to have someone looking after it I've told what happens when nobody does.
What stays yours
This is the question I'd ask first, and it's worth asking anyone: the answer belongs in writing, not in a conversation.
With me, on both routes: domain, content, photos and contact data are in your name from day one. The keys are yours, I don't hold them.
On the site itself, exactly when it becomes yours is something we put in writing when we talk, before anything is signed: ask it, of me and of anyone else, and have the answer written down.
One distinction is worth holding on to regardless: the fee has no end date, it carries on for as long as you need it. "The site is yours" reads easily as "I've finished paying", and those aren't the same thing: what the fee buys is next month's work.
What's inside a monthly fee: the updates and four to eight hours a month
There are two different things inside a monthly fee, and keeping them apart is the only way to see what you're buying.
The first is what keeps the site standing: domain, hosting, certificate, backups, security and platform updates. It isn't counted in hours and it's included: it's the floor, not the work.
The second is what makes the site change, and that one is counted: my fee contains four to eight hours a month, depending on the band. The point is that the first doesn't eat the second: if a certificate needs renewing, I don't deduct an hour of work for it.
Those hours go on this: changing prices, opening times, a new page, a new product going live; looking at what actually brought enquiries and what didn't; sorting things while they're still small. It isn't an emergency fund: it's work that happens every month whether you call or not.
It's also why a fee of €90 a month and one of several hundred aren't comparable: there isn't the same amount of work inside. Neither is wrong; they answer two different needs.
What each extra language costs
An extra language isn't paid once and done: it's a permanent multiplier on content, ranking and maintenance. That's why I price it as its own line.
The increment is flat and the same across every band, and that is already telling: translating and maintaining a large site does not cost proportionally more than doing it on a small one, because the extra work is the same.
On the SEO and blog service the increment per language is exactly the two extra articles a month for that market, not a markup. Campaigns don't scale on languages: there the cost depends on how many markets you're running and how much budget there is to manage, not on how many languages the site has.
Beyond three languages it gets quoted by hand, because at that point the project is outside the brackets.
What it costs to keep a site online
This part exists with any supplier, and even if you build the site yourself.
| Item | Market cost |
|---|---|
| .it or .com domain | €10 – 30/year |
| Shared hosting | €30 – 120/year |
| Managed WordPress hosting | €180 – 600/year |
| Security certificate | often free, up to €250/year |
| Paid plugins and extensions | €100 – 300/year |
| Maintenance | €50 – 150/month for a business site |
| Redesign, every 3-5 years | €1,500 – 4,000 |
On the monthly fee the domain, hosting, certificate, backups, updates and maintenance are included and don't arrive as separate renewals; a redesign, when the time comes, is looked at separately. With the one-off payment they stay separate: they're yours, managed by you or by whoever you choose.
The €19-to-€120 a month plans: who they work for
In Italy there are subscription offers starting at €19-29 a month and reaching a little over a hundred. They're real, they work, and for a portion of businesses they're the right choice. It's worth saying who for.
They work well when: the site is in one language, the pages are few and rarely change, the content already exists, there's nothing to connect to an ERP or a booking system, and the goal is being there more than being found. The business-card site, in other words: built properly, it'll sit quite happily for years.
Many, in this kind of offer, ask for a twelve-month commitment. I don't: I dropped the minimum term.
My work starts where those conditions stop holding: when the languages become two, when the site has to bring in measurable enquiries, when there's a management system on the other end, when there's something to change every month.
What an online shop costs
On the Italian market an online shop with a simple catalogue costs €3,000-7,000, a structured one €7,000-20,000. But for a shop the build quote is the least decisive part of the sum: there are payment fees, the fixed contributions owed even at zero turnover, and above all the advertising budget, which in the first year is almost always the heaviest item. I've put all three parts, with checked figures, in how much an online shop costs.
With me the online shop is on a monthly fee (on a catalogue of around 30 products), with no minimum term. Details on the sell online page.
The online shop, like the site, I only sell on a monthly fee, and in its case the reason is even starker. A static site is a legitimate choice for someone who already has people keeping it current. A static shop doesn't: it simply stops selling. Products change, prices change, payment methods change, and a catalogue nobody is watching becomes a problem within months.
When it isn't a website at all, it's software
Sometimes what you need isn't a website. It's a program: something that tracks stock, handles jobs, works out quotes, makes two systems talk to each other that currently don't. From the outside they look alike, both open in a browser, but they're different trades, and they cost differently.
The practical difference is this: a website tells and sells, software gets work done. The first faces people who don't know you and have to understand quickly; the second faces colleagues who'll use it every day for years, and has to be built around how they work.
There's also a specific reason custom software has no published bracket like everything else on this page, and it's the same point I made above about optimisation. On a website much of the work is already solved and tested, and that's what keeps the price where you see it. Custom software is by definition the part that can't be reused: if your process were the same as someone else's, a program would already exist off the shelf and building one wouldn't make sense.
So there it gets quoted to measure, after looking at the process alongside the people who run it every day. And the first job is almost never writing code: it's working out what to automate and what to simply drop.
If that's your situation, I've written about it on the page about custom software.
What a hotel website costs
It sits above the average, for three concrete reasons.
The first is that multilingual isn't optional: two or three languages are the minimum, and as you saw above that's the heaviest item after content. The second is that there's almost always something to connect, PMS, channel manager, booking engine, and those systems have to be tested, not just plugged in. Bear in mind that booking engines and channel managers have their own subscriptions, to their own suppliers, which aren't included in any website quote.
The third is that a property's website doesn't compete with another website: it competes with the commission you pay the OTAs on every night. That's a different comparison, and it changes how much it makes sense to put in.
For a hotel the figures to look at are the two-language ones, not the single-language ones: for anyone hosting guests from abroad, single-language isn't even an option. I've written about it in detail in the section for places to stay.
How I work, and why the price sits there
Back to the second half of the answer, the one about optimisation, because it's the part you can't see from outside, and it's what keeps the price where it is.
I use automation for the repetitive parts, AI in producing content, and a set of components I've built over time and reuse from one project to the next. The contact form that actually works, cookie consent handling, the structure search engines read without effort, the product page: these are solved problems, tested on dozens of real sites.
I don't take work out of the project. I take repetitive work out of the project. It's a difference you can see in the result: a reused contact form has already met every way it could break, so that's a part of the project that doesn't need solving twice.
The time that frees up goes on the things that in your case are different from everyone else's: what you say, to whom, and why anyone should pick you. That part doesn't get reused and doesn't get automated.
And no, a machine doesn't write the copy for me. AI shortens the mechanical part, reordering, rephrasing, preparing variants to judge, not the part where you have to work out what's worth saying. That stays the slowest bit, and rightly so.
How long it takes, and what's needed from you
Two to three weeks for a simple project, three to six weeks for a professional site if the materials are ready, two to five months for an online shop.
Timelines slip for two reasons almost every time, and neither is technical: materials that don't arrive, copy, photos, price lists, logins, and slow approvals. If you already know who in the business decides, and that person has half an hour a week, you've removed half the possible delays.
How to compare two quotes
Two numbers are comparable only if they describe the same thing. These are the items that have to appear in both, otherwise you're comparing different objects:
- How many languages
- Who writes the copy
- Who supplies the photos
- How many support hours are included, and for how long
- Which external systems have to be connected
- Who owns the code, the domain and the data
- Whether there's a minimum term and a setup cost
- How long delivery takes, and what's needed from you to make that timeline real
If one of these is missing from one of the two, it doesn't mean that quote is worse: it means you don't yet know what's in it. Asking is normal, and anyone who works properly is happy to answer.
The guarantee
Thirty days to change your mind.
In more than ten years I have never had a client unhappy with the work delivered. That is why I can afford to say this: you have 30 days from accepting the quote to stop, or until the site goes live if that comes first. Within that window I refund everything you have paid and we part ways, with no further claim and no argument. There are no conditions to meet and nothing to prove: you decide.
You get me, within one working day.
No switchboard, no support form. If you write or call and I do not answer within one working day, you do not pay that month.
I take the risk at the start. It is the only way I have to say “trust me” and have it mean something.
Where to start
If you've read this far you've probably already worked out which bracket you're in. If you haven't, that's exactly why a conversation is worth having.
If you'd rather start with something small and concrete, there's the digital check-up: I go through the site you have now, your numbers and your competitors, and leave you a document listing what to do in order of impact. If we then start with one of the monthly services, you don't pay for it. And it's absolutely fine if it stops there.
Otherwise write to me and tell me what you do and what you need: I'll tell you which bracket you're in, and if I don't think you need a new site I'll tell you that too.