01What actually moves the price
Two quotes for the same five-page site can differ by a factor of five, and it is almost never the design that explains the gap. It is what each quote quietly assumes. One assumes you supply finished text and photographs. The other assumes someone has to write and shoot them. One counts a services page as a page. The other counts each of your eight services as its own. Neither is dishonest, but until both are written down in the same units you are comparing two different products and calling it a price comparison.
- Page count. A one-page landing is a different job from a five-page site with a services section.
- Integrations. Payments, booking systems, a CRM or an ordering flow each add real work.
- Content. If you supply text and photos it is cheaper. If someone has to write and shoot, it is not.
- Languages. Two is normal. Beyond two the cost climbs faster than people expect.
- Who builds it. A template configured by a freelancer and custom code from a studio are different products at different prices.
02The costs quotes usually leave out
The build price is not the price. Domain and hosting are small and predictable, so nobody argues about them. What surprises people is the maintenance and the cost of change. On WordPress, updates are not optional: unpatched plugins are the single most common way a small business site gets hacked, and somebody has to be paid to apply them or you are gambling. Then there is the first time you need a phone number changed. If you did not agree an hourly rate up front, you will discover it at the worst possible moment, which is when you are already annoyed.
- Domain, roughly 10 to 15 EUR a year.
- Hosting, from a few euro a month to a few tens depending on what the site does.
- Maintenance. On WordPress this is not optional, because unpatched plugins are how sites get hacked.
- Changes after launch. Ask the hourly rate now, not the first time you need a phone number changed.
- Ownership. If you cannot take the code and the domain elsewhere, the quoted price is not the real price.
03How to tell an honest quote from a bad one
You do not need to understand the technology to judge a quote. You need to notice what it refuses to put in writing. A quote that names a page count, says who writes the text, and states what happens to your existing Google positions is written by someone who has done this before and been burned by not saying it. A quote that is one number and a paragraph of adjectives is written by someone who has not, or who is hoping you will not ask. The single loudest signal is a guaranteed position in Google. Nobody controls that, and offering it tells you how the rest of their claims are constructed.
- It names a number of pages, not just a total.
- It says who writes the text and who supplies the photos.
- It states what happens to your existing Google positions if you already have a site.
- It tells you what you own at the end, in plain words.
- It does not promise a Google position. Nobody can, and anyone promising one is telling you something else about themselves.
What the price actually bought on a real build
Rotiseria came to us wanting off the delivery aggregators. The website was the small half of that job. The real cost sat in the ordering flow, Stripe checkout, pickup slots and the confirmation email that fires on every order, plus an admin view the kitchen uses during service. That is why we quote a website separately from a system: quoting them together is how a 500 EUR expectation meets a 5,000 EUR build and somebody feels cheated. We tell you which one you are buying before we start.
See the build: Rotiseria Baba NovacWhere PROOF48 fits
PROOF48 publishes these numbers because most studios do not, and because we would rather you compare us properly than be surprised at the end. We build the site first and invoice after, so the price is agreed before we start and you see the result before you pay it.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Building software since 2018. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, which means every opinion here was paid for in builds rather than in theory.