The short answer
A small business website in India costs between ₹5,000 and ₹30,000 in 2026. E-commerce starts around ₹25,000. A custom web application or internal dashboard starts near ₹40,000 and has no real ceiling, because it stops being a website and becomes software.
Anyone giving you a single number without asking what the site has to do is guessing. The spread exists because "a website" covers a brochure with five pages and a system that runs a business, and those are not the same product.
| What you are buying | Typical range | Realistic timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Single-page site or landing page | ₹5,000 – ₹8,000 | 3–5 days |
| 5–7 page business site | ₹7,000 – ₹15,000 | 7–10 days |
| 15–20 page site with blog and CMS | ₹18,000 – ₹35,000 | 2–3 weeks |
| E-commerce with payment gateway | ₹25,000 – ₹60,000 | 2–4 weeks |
| Custom web app / ERP dashboard | ₹40,000 upward | 4–8 weeks |
| Annual maintenance (optional) | ₹2,000 – ₹6,000 / month | ongoing |
What actually moves the price
Page count is the thing clients ask about and very nearly the least important input. Ten pages of similar layout cost barely more than five, because the second five reuse everything the first five established.
What genuinely changes the number is whether the site has to do something rather than say something. Every one of the following adds real engineering time, and any quote that ignores them is going to be revised later:
- A payment gateway. Razorpay or Stripe integration plus the failure paths - abandoned payment, gateway timeout, duplicate charge - is several days on its own.
- Accounts and logins. Sessions, password reset, and the security around both.
- An admin panel so you can edit the site yourself. This is a second application with its own interface, and it is why an editable site costs more than a static one.
- Integration with software you already run - Zoho, Tally, a CRM, WhatsApp Business API. Cost depends entirely on whether that system has a usable API.
- Multi-language, especially Hindi alongside English. Structural, not a translation cost.
- Genuine custom design rather than a themed layout.
Why the same brief costs different amounts in different cities
A five-page site quoted at ₹8,000 in Patna is frequently ₹25,000 in Bengaluru or Gurugram. The work is identical. What differs is the cost of running the business doing it - office rent, salaries, and what the local market will bear.
This cuts both ways and it is worth being honest about. Metro agencies are not automatically better, and small-city developers are not automatically worse. What you should compare is what is actually delivered: is it a custom build or a purchased theme with your logo dropped in, do you get the source code, is there an admin panel, and who fixes it at 11pm when checkout breaks.
What is not included in most quotes
Three costs sit outside almost every development quote and surprise people later. Ask about all three before you agree a number.
- Domain: ₹800 – ₹1,500 a year for a .com or .in, renewed annually and in your own name, not your developer's.
- Hosting: ₹0 to ₹5,000 a year. A modern site on Vercel or Netlify can genuinely cost nothing at low traffic; a WordPress site needs real hosting.
- Content. Photographs, product descriptions and text are usually the client's job, and the single most common reason a project runs late.
Questions to ask before you pay a deposit
Price is only one variable, and the cheapest quote regularly turns out to be the most expensive once you factor in a rebuild. These six questions separate a real engagement from one you will regret:
- Do I own the source code and the domain outright when I have paid?
- Is this a custom build or a purchased theme, and which theme?
- Can I edit text, images and prices myself without coming back to you?
- What happens if something breaks after handover, and for how long?
- Will the site pass Core Web Vitals on a mobile connection?
- Who is actually writing the code - you, or someone you are subcontracting to?