Website and App Cost Calculator

Every agency quote arrives as one number with no working shown, which is why the same brief comes back at 8,000 and at 45,000. This calculator does the opposite: pick the shape of your project and see the hours, the phase by phase split, the regional rate that drives most of the difference, and what it costs to keep the thing alive after launch. Nothing is gated and nothing is sent anywhere. The whole model is written out below so you can argue with it.

How the estimate is built

No black box. The calculator starts from a base effort for the project type, adds hours per page or screen, then applies a design multiplier, fixed hours for each integration, and a regional rate band. Everything below is the actual model.

Base effort and scope

• Marketing website: 60 hours base, 8 hours per page.
• Online store: 160 hours base, 10 hours per page.
• Web app or SaaS: 320 hours base, 35 hours per screen.
• Mobile app: 300 hours base, 30 hours per screen. Shipping both platforms multiplies by 1.6 rather than 2, because backend, design and QA are largely shared.

Design depth

Template based work multiplies effort by 0.85, a custom design by 1.0, and a bespoke design with a reusable design system by 1.3. That last jump is the one most people underestimate, and it is also the one that pays back on the second and third project.

Integrations

Each of these adds fixed hours on top: CMS 25, accounts and login 35, payments 40, CRM integration 30, third party APIs 25, AI features 60, several languages 30, admin dashboard 80. AI features carry the largest number because the work is rarely the API call. It is the prompt design, the evaluation, the fallbacks and the cost control around it, the same ground we cover in AI in software development.

Rates by region

Blended means the average across senior and junior people on the team, not the rate of the person writing the code. This single choice moves the total by a factor of five, which is why the same brief comes back at wildly different numbers. How to pick between those options without buying the cheapest disaster is the subject of our guide to software development outsourcing.

The rest of the model

Phases split the total effort as discovery 8 percent, design 18, frontend 30, backend and integrations 24, QA 12 and project management 8. The displayed range applies 0.85 to the low end and 1.30 to the high end, which reflects how much a specification usually moves once work starts. Calendar time assumes a small team delivering about 60 productive hours per week. Yearly upkeep is 15 to 20 percent of the build cost and covers hosting oversight, dependency and security updates, small changes and support.

What actually drives the number up

Scope creep is the famous answer and it is not the most common one. In practice the biggest multipliers are integrations that touch money or identity, because they bring compliance and edge cases; a design that is invented rather than assembled; and any requirement to migrate real data from an old system, which is almost never quoted honestly. Architecture matters too: splitting a small product into services early buys operational overhead you then pay for every month, which we argue through in microservices versus monolith.

What the estimate does not cover

• Hosting, domains and third party subscriptions.
• Content, copywriting, photography and video.
• Migration of legacy data beyond a straightforward import.
• Marketing, advertising and SEO work after launch.
• Support and new features once the build is signed off.

Questions people ask

How much does it cost to build a website in 2026?

A ten page marketing website on a template lands between 3,500 and 10,000 with a Central or Eastern European team, and two to three times that in North America. An online store of the same size falls between 8,000 and 22,000. A custom web app with ten screens starts around 20,000 and reaches 57,000 before you add integrations.

How much does it cost to make an app?

A mobile app of about 12 screens on one platform falls between 20,000 and 56,000 with a Central or Eastern European team, and between 56,000 and 154,000 in North America. Adding the second platform adds roughly 60 percent, not another 100 percent.

Why do quotes for the same brief differ so much?

Rates differ by a factor of five between regions, design depth swings the hours by about 50 percent, and many quotes quietly include or exclude discovery, project management and QA, which are about a quarter of the total between them.

Is fixed price or time and materials better?

Fixed price suits a well specified project with stable scope, and the vendor prices the risk into the number. Time and materials suits discovery led work and is cheaper when the specification is honest. Beyond three months, time and materials with a capped budget per sprint is usually the sane middle.

For the mobile side specifically, with worked numbers by size, platform and region, see how much it costs to make an app in 2026.