Strategy · 10 min read
Website development cost in 2026: the build, and the three years after
A website quote tells you what launch day costs. This guide prices websites by what they must do, in INR, AED and GBP, and adds up the three years that follow.
Earlier this year a founder sat across the table in our Mumbai studio, pushed three printed quotes towards me and asked which studio was lying. All three were for what she called “the same website”. One said ₹90,000. One said ₹4.5 lakh. One said ₹14 lakh.
Nobody was lying. Over two rounds of chai we worked out that she held quotes for three different websites, and only one was the website her business needed.
This guide is that conversation, written down: what a website costs to build in India, the UAE and the UK in 2026, what it costs to run, and how to compare quotes on the number that matters, three years of ownership.
The short answer
In India, a business website costs anything from ₹75,000 for a credible template site to ₹33 lakh and more for a portal that people log into and pay through. Most growing companies we meet need something in between: a custom website that explains what they do and wins enquiries. That typically costs ₹3.5 lakh to ₹8 lakh, or AED 15,000 to 35,000, or £3,100 to £7,300.
Then there is the part nobody puts on the first page of the quote. Domain, hosting, email and licences usually add ₹2,000 to ₹15,000 a month, and a maintenance plan adds more. Over three years, running a website costs about as much as building it.
Why quotes for the same website never match
When quotes for one brief differ fifteenfold, the studios are pricing different things.
Different outcomes. One studio heard “a website” and priced ten pages on a template. Another heard “a website that wins enquiries from procurement teams” and priced research, copy, search foundations and a lead form wired to the CRM. Only one matches the job.
Different risk. Late content, an old site with years of rankings, an undocumented CRM: a low quote often leaves these risks with you, billed later as changes. A higher quote may already carry them.
Different inclusions. Copywriting, photography, accessibility, speed targets, content migration, training, hosting and a warranty period can each be in or out. Put the quotes side by side, line by line, and the gap usually shrinks.
Website development cost by outcome tier
We find it more useful to price a website by what it must do than by how many pages it has. A ten page site that has to convince a hospital procurement committee is harder work than a forty page site that lists opening hours.
| Tier | What the website has to do | India | UAE | UK | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Presence | Be found, look credible, take a message | ₹75,000 to ₹3 lakh | AED 3,200 to 13,000 | £700 to £2,800 | 2 to 4 weeks |
| 2. Expertise | Explain what you do and win enquiries | ₹3.5 lakh to ₹8 lakh | AED 15,000 to 35,000 | £3,100 to £7,300 | 6 to 10 weeks |
| 3. Demand | Attract, qualify and route leads for several audiences | ₹8 lakh to ₹18 lakh | AED 35,000 to 78,000 | £7,300 to £16,500 | 10 to 16 weeks |
| 4. Work | Let people log in, apply, book, pay or renew | ₹12 lakh to ₹33 lakh, and up | AED 55,000 to 147,000, and up | £12,000 to £31,000, and up | 3 to 6 months |
These are build costs for 2026, excluding GST in India and VAT in the UAE. AED and GBP figures are rounded equivalents, not live conversions.
Tier 1: be found and look credible
A clean site on a well chosen template with your services, contact details and a map. A good freelancer does this well, and for a new practice or local business it is often the right answer. We rarely build at this tier, and we will say so if it is what you need.
Tier 2: explain your expertise and win enquiries
Custom design around real content, a CMS your team can edit, search foundations, analytics, WhatsApp and enquiry pathways, and speed that holds on a mid range phone. This is where most professional services firms, manufacturers and funded start-ups belong, and where our website design and development work usually begins.
Tier 3: generate and qualify demand
Several audiences, deep content, gated resources, calculators or configurators, CRM integration, a headless CMS and often two languages. The site stops being a brochure and becomes part of the sales process.
Tier 4: do real work
Member portals, booking and renewal systems, certification platforms and dashboards. The site now holds accounts, payments and workflows, so it is planned and priced as software, usually starting with a Discovery Sprint. Online stores sit on their own scale: our ecommerce team and our Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison cover those.
What moves the price inside a tier
| Driver | Typical effect on the build |
|---|---|
| Writing the content for you | Adds 10 to 20% |
| A second language, especially Arabic with right to left layouts | Adds 20 to 35% |
| Moving an existing site without losing search rankings | ₹50,000 to ₹2 lakh for the URL inventory, redirects and checks |
| Each integration: CRM, booking, payments or ERP | ₹50,000 for a simple form to CRM link; a proper ERP sync starts around ₹1.5 lakh |
| Custom illustration, animation or 3D | ₹1 lakh to ₹5 lakh |
| Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA | 5 to 10% when planned from the start; far more when retrofitted |
The most expensive of these to get wrong is migration: a site that loses its rankings in the move can take a year to earn them back. Our website rebuild checklist lists every step.
Website development cost in Dubai and the UK
Dubai and the UAE
Established Dubai agencies commonly quote AED 25,000 to 60,000 for a focused business website, and considerably more for portals. Budget for three things particular to the Gulf: 5% VAT on the invoice, Arabic with right to left layouts built in from the start rather than bolted on, and UAE payment options such as Tabby, Tamara or Network International if the site takes money. The UAE’s PDPL also shapes how you collect and store personal data.
The UAE is 1.5 hours behind India, so working days overlap almost completely. Our page for teams in Dubai and the UAE covers how that works in practice.
The United Kingdom
Small UK agencies commonly quote £6,000 to £20,000 for a focused business website, and London studios with a strong portfolio often start above £25,000. UK clients who work with us get an afternoon overlap: a daily call at 10am London time is 2:30pm in Mumbai. Many UK agencies work with us under their own name through our partnership models.
What a website costs per month once it is live
| Item | India, per month | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | ₹100 to ₹250 | A .com or .in, usually paid yearly |
| Hosting | ₹800 to ₹10,000 | Shared hosting at the low end; managed cloud with a CDN and a staging site at the top |
| Business email | ₹150 to ₹1,400 per mailbox | Hosted email and office apps from the major providers |
| Licences | ₹500 to ₹5,000 | Premium plugins, forms, fonts, CMS seats and spam protection |
| Maintenance retainer | ₹5,000 to ₹20,000 | Updates, tested backups, uptime monitoring and small changes |
| Growth, if you want it | From ₹40,000 | Search, content and conversion work, month after month |
For a small team, domain, hosting, email and licences usually come to ₹2,000 to ₹15,000 a month, about AED 90 to 650 or £20 to £140. The maintenance retainer sits on top.
Growth is a separate decision. If you want the site improved every month through search, content and experiments, that is our Care & Grow plan, from ₹40,000 a month (US$500 or AED 1,800). Not every website needs it. A tier 2 site that brings in a steady flow of enquiries can live happily on maintenance alone.
I learned to price the years after launch with a spreadsheet. In 2018, before D&C was a studio, I listed every domain and server our campus community was paying for. Nobody remembered what the sites had cost to build. Everybody remembered the renewals. That spreadsheet became Hosting Seva, and the habit stayed with us.
The three year cost of ownership
| Tier | Build | Running, per year | Three years, India | Three years, UAE | Three years, UK |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Presence | ₹75,000 to ₹3 lakh | ₹40,000 to ₹1.2 lakh | ₹1.95 lakh to ₹6.6 lakh | AED 8,500 to 28,500 | £1,800 to £6,000 |
| 2. Expertise | ₹3.5 lakh to ₹8 lakh | ₹1.5 lakh to ₹3.5 lakh | ₹8 lakh to ₹18.5 lakh | AED 35,000 to 80,000 | £7,300 to £17,000 |
| 3. Demand | ₹8 lakh to ₹18 lakh | ₹3 lakh to ₹6 lakh | ₹17 lakh to ₹36 lakh | AED 73,000 to 155,000 | £15,600 to £33,000 |
| 4. Work | ₹12 lakh to ₹33 lakh | ₹5 lakh to ₹12 lakh | ₹27 lakh to ₹69 lakh | AED 117,000 to 300,000 | £24,800 to £63,000 |
Running costs include domain, hosting, email, licences, a maintenance retainer and a modest budget for new pages, but not advertising or growth work. Three years is roughly how long a well built website stays current before it deserves a proper refresh.
In every tier, the build is only 40 to 50% of what you will spend, so running costs deserve the same scrutiny. When we modernised Ekeeda’s learning platform and moved it to the cloud, infrastructure costs fell by 38% while page loads went from 6.2 seconds to 1.9. That saving repeats every month.
A worked example: two quotes, one Thane consultancy
Take a 40 person engineering consultancy in Thane. Its work arrives through referrals and tenders, and buyers check the website before they call. It has two quotes.
Quote A is ₹1.5 lakh: a template site, cheap shared hosting and fixes billed by the hour. Quote B is ₹6 lakh: custom design around rewritten content, a lean build on managed hosting and a maintenance retainer.
Now assume both sites attract 1,200 visitors a month. The slower, thinner site turns 0.8% of them into enquiries; the faster, clearer one turns 2%. These are assumptions, not promises, but they sit within the range we see for professional services firms.
| Over three years | Quote A | Quote B |
|---|---|---|
| Build | ₹1,50,000 | ₹6,00,000 |
| Domain, hosting, email and licences | ₹1,26,000 (₹3,500 a month) | ₹2,16,000 (₹6,000 a month) |
| Maintenance | ₹1,80,000 (hourly fixes, about ₹5,000 a month) | ₹4,32,000 (retainer, ₹12,000 a month) |
| New pages and landing pages | Squeezed into the hourly fixes | ₹1,80,000 (₹60,000 a year) |
| Speed and search rescue in year two | ₹1,00,000 | Not needed |
| Rebuild at the end of year three | ₹4,00,000 | Not needed |
| Three year total | ₹9,56,000 | ₹14,28,000 |
| Enquiries over three years | 346 | 864 |
| Cost per enquiry | ₹2,763 | ₹1,653 |
Quote A is ₹4.72 lakh cheaper over three years. It is also 67% more expensive per enquiry, and it ends with a rebuild. For a consultancy where one new client is worth more than ₹5 lakh, a single extra win pays the difference.
The cheaper quote bought a tier 1 website for a tier 2 job. Of all the mistakes in this guide, it is the most common and the most expensive.
What we charge, plainly
| Engagement | India | US | UAE | UK, approximately |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Focused business website | From ₹3.5 lakh | From US$4,000 | From AED 15,000 | £3,100 |
| Discovery Sprint, three weeks | From ₹3.5 lakh | From US$4,000 | From AED 15,000 | £3,100 |
| Product Build, for portals and web applications | From ₹12 lakh | From US$15,000 | From AED 55,000 | £12,000 |
| Care & Grow plan | From ₹40,000 a month | From US$500 a month | From AED 1,800 a month | £400 a month |
A focused business website with us usually takes 6 to 10 weeks. Portals and web applications start with the Discovery Sprint, which ends in a scope, a roadmap and an estimate with its assumptions shown, so the build price rests on evidence rather than optimism. You can read more about how we design, build and look after websites, including how we test on real phones.
A checklist before you sign
- The outcome is written down. The quote says what the site must achieve, not only how many pages it has.
- Content has an owner. Who writes, who photographs, and by which date.
- Every running cost is listed per month, with the supplier and who pays it.
- You own the accounts. Domain, hosting, code, design files and analytics sit in your name.
- Migration is in scope if you have an existing site: a URL inventory, a redirect map and a watch after launch.
- Speed and accessibility targets are measurable and tested on a mid range phone, not only the office laptop.
- Maintenance is priced, with response times you can hold someone to.
- Assumptions are visible, along with what counts as a change and how changes are priced.
If a quote cannot answer these, it is not yet a quote. It is a guess on a letterhead. Still shaping the request? Our guide on how to brief a digital product studio helps you get comparable answers.
The honest conclusion
A website’s price is not the first invoice. It is the build plus three years of keeping the site fast, secure and useful, measured against what it does for your business. Price the outcome, add the running costs and compare the totals.
If you would like a second opinion on the quotes you are holding, send them to us. A partner reads every brief and replies within one working day, and we will tell you plainly if a template would do the job.