Search "how much does a website cost" and you find answers like "from 200 to 50,000 euros". That helps no one.
The problem isn't a lack of information. It's that the price depends on what you're buying, and many people don't know that until they've already made a bad decision.
The 3 real price tiers
The first tier runs from 300 to 800 euros. You're paying someone to set up Wix, Webflow or a prepackaged WordPress theme. It's not development: it's setup. The result looks like thousands of other sites. It's fine if you have zero budget and need something online right away, but don't expect to rank on Google or have custom features.
The second tier, from 1,500 to 4,000 euros, is the freelance one. The range is wide because it depends on who you hire. A beginner freelancer charges 800 to 1,200 euros and delivers something hard to maintain. An experienced one starts at 1,800 to 2,500 euros and delivers something that holds up over time. My base price for a complete site with SEO included is 1,800 euros.
The third tier is the agency one: from 5,000 euros up, often well up. You're paying a whole team: account manager, designer, developer. It makes sense for large companies with complex needs. For a local small business, in most cases it's oversized.
What actually changes between the tiers
It isn't the looks. A 400-euro site can look nice. The difference is underneath.
Speed: a WordPress with 20 plugins loads in 5 to 8 seconds on mobile. A well-built Next.js site loads in under a second. Google penalizes the first one. It's not an opinion: it's the logic of Core Web Vitals.
Technical SEO: many website builders don't have the right structure from the start. Duplicate titles, unoptimized URLs, missing schema markup. Fixing these things after launch costs twice as much as doing them right away.
Flexibility: with a template you only get so far. Then you run into the limits of the platform instead of building what you need.
When it's worth spending more
The right question is: how much is acquiring a new customer worth to you?
If each customer brings in 300 euros of margin, a 2,400-euro site needs to bring you 8 new customers to pay for itself. If each customer brings in 2,000 euros of margin, one is enough.
It's worth investing when the site is your main acquisition channel, when you need features that don't exist on Wix, or when you want to stand out from the local competition.
It isn't worth investing when you still need to figure out whether your service works. In that case start simple, validate, then invest.
What my work includes
Custom design, no templates. Development in Next.js: fast, secure sites with great performance on mobile. Technical SEO included in the price: correct meta tags, schema markup, optimized Core Web Vitals, structured URLs.
I always start from the concrete problem you want to solve. "I want more online bookings" is something I can work on. "I want a nice site" isn't a metric: I can't measure whether I did a good job.
You can find the detailed prices on the pricing page.