What a Website Actually Costs in 2026: The Estimate, Line by Line

Website prices in 2026: ranges by site type

Start from the right premise: a website price is not a product price, it is the price of a team working a certain number of hours. The same landing page can honestly cost 30,000 RUB or 300,000 RUB, because behind those numbers sit completely different amounts of research, design and testing. The useful question is never "what does a website cost" but "what does a website cost that solves my problem reliably and still works in a year".

The 2026 market ranges: landing pages 15,000 to 100,000 RUB, custom website builds 150,000 to 500,000 RUB, online stores 400,000 to 1,500,000 RUB. These are industry ranges covering freelancers, agencies and product teams alike. Veltos.Tech entry prices sit inside them: from 50,000 RUB for a landing page, from 100,000 RUB for a corporate site or store, from 300,000 RUB for a web application, from 35,000 RUB for work on an existing site.

The bottom of every range is almost always a template, a ready-made theme or a builder with light customisation. The top means custom design, a real back end, integrations with accounting systems and proper testing. Nothing in between is "overpaying": what changes is who absorbs the risk, the contractor or you. Use the table below as a first filter. If your budget sits in one row and your expectations in another, that gap will surface during design at the latest.

The estimate line by line: what you are actually paying for

A serious proposal is always split into stages, and the proportions are surprisingly stable across projects. Discovery and requirements take 5-10% of the budget, prototyping another 5-10%, UX/UI design 20-25%, front end 15-20%, back end and admin 20-30%, integrations 10-15%, content 5-10%, QA 8-12%, launch and handover 3-5%. If the proposal contains a single line reading "website development, 400,000 RUB", you are not buying a product, you are buying a promise.

Design is the most underestimated line. Twenty-five percent of the budget looks extravagant until you unpack it: key screen layouts, responsive versions across three breakpoints, element states (hover, loading, error, empty), a design system with typography and components, and revisions after each review. Cutting this line does not buy you a simpler site. It buys you a site the developer finishes to personal taste, which then gets redone anyway.

Integrations are the second. A brief line saying "CRM integration" can mean pushing a form into a CRM in four hours, or a two-way order status exchange with an accounting system through a middleware layer, with conflict handling and a retry queue, which is weeks of work. An estimate that does not name the exchange protocol, the data format and who configures the accounting side is not an estimate, it is a future argument.

QA deserves its own note. Eight to twelve percent of the budget goes on real devices, multiple browsers, slow networks and malformed form input. It is the only line you cannot see in the finished product, because a well tested site simply works. A poorly tested one also looks like it works, right up to the moment a customer on a slow mobile connection cannot complete a checkout.

Why one brief comes back with quotes 5-10x apart

Sending the same brief to ten companies and getting back 80,000 to 900,000 RUB is completely normal. It does not mean somebody is greedy, it means the brief allows a dozen readings and each vendor priced their own. The cheap quote is almost always the literal reading: this many pages, this many forms. The expensive one prices the risks: what happens with a 5,000-item catalogue, who writes the copy, how filters behave, whether it survives traffic.

The second multiplier is seniority. The same screen takes a junior twelve hours and three rounds of fixes, and a senior four hours with edge cases handled up front. The hourly rate differs by two, the screen cost often does not, but the odds of rewriting that screen in six months differ a lot. "Cheaper per hour" and "cheaper per project" are not the same thing, and that is the confusion vendors most often trade on.

The third multiplier is who pays for rework. A cheap proposal usually defines neither a revision limit nor what "done" means, so you pay for rework, either as an extra invoice or in lost weeks. An expensive proposal has rework priced in and a warranty written down, typically three to six months of defect fixes at the vendor cost. The price gap between the two is the cost of insurance, not a markup.

• Ask how many hours each stage carries. A refusal to name hours usually means the number was guessed.
• Ask what the warranty covers, how long it lasts, and what counts as a new task instead.
• Ask who writes the copy and prepares the photos. Content, not code, causes most missed deadlines.
• Ask what happens if requirements change midway. The answer reveals how the process really works.

The costs missing from the quote that always arrive anyway

Content comes first. Copy, photography, product descriptions, translations. A service page costs roughly 1,500 to 6,000 RUB to write depending on how deep the research goes, and product photography starts around 20,000 RUB for a small catalogue. Populating a 500-item store by hand is tens of hours that somebody has to pay for. Quotes rarely include this line because the vendor assumes the client supplies content.

Infrastructure is second. A domain runs 200 to 2,000 RUB a year, hosting or a VPS from 3,000 to 40,000 RUB a year depending on load, SSL is free now, but transactional email, a CDN and backups all cost money. Licences live separately: a commercial CMS edition, paid modules, fonts, stock imagery. Together that is 10,000 to 80,000 RUB in the first year for a typical corporate site.

Third are integrations with accounting systems. A standard connector might cost 40,000 to 60,000 RUB, while a non-standard export with a bespoke product structure runs 100,000 to 200,000 RUB and a month of work. Here is the part nobody mentions: work on the accounting side is usually done by your own integrator and invoiced separately. Agree the responsibility split up front, or the project stalls between two vendors.

Fourth is life after launch: support, updates, small changes, new pages for campaigns. A sane annual budget is 10-20% of the build cost. Veltos.Tech prices work on an existing site from 35,000 RUB, which is closer to reality than hoping to launch and forget. A site that does not change for a year loses rankings and conversion simply because competitors and user behaviour move on.

• Content and photography: from 20,000 RUB, considerably more for a store.
• Domain, hosting, email, backups: 10,000-80,000 RUB in year one.
• ERP or CRM integration: 40,000-200,000 RUB plus work on the accounting side.
• Support and iteration: 10-20% of the project cost per year.

Fixed price or time and material: which one protects the client

Fixed price works in exactly one situation: when scope is defined in detail and will not move. A promo site for a trade show, a landing page for a specific campaign, a standard store on a ready platform, all of these are honestly priced as fixed. The client knows the budget and the vendor knows the boundary. The vendor risk is baked in, typically 15-30% on top, and that is a fair price for predictability.

Time and material is fairer where requirements are still being discovered: services, customer portals, stores with unusual logic, anything where the first demos reveal that half the original assumptions were wrong. Fixed price hurts the client here, because the vendor defends the estimate and answers every improvement with "that was not in the spec", and you end up paying for compliance with a document instead of a result.

The practical compromise we use most often: fixed price for discovery and design, then a refined fixed price or a sprint-based time and material arrangement with a budget cap for build. The first stage costs 15-25% of the project, and it is exactly what turns a brief into a document you can quote firmly against. If a vendor names an exact price for a large project before any discovery, either the padding is enormous or the change requests are coming.

• Fixed price when scope is frozen and you will pay a premium for predictability.
• Time and material when the product is being discovered and change is expected, not exceptional.
• Hybrid: fixed for discovery and design, capped sprints for the build.
• Either way you need a written definition of done, or a dispute is guaranteed.

How to cut 30% safely, and three savings that always come back

Safe budget cuts almost always follow one rule: reduce scope, not quality. A first release without a blog, without a customer account area, without extra languages, with five pages instead of twenty, is 30-40% off the estimate with zero compromise on reliability. The second lever is standard solutions where individuality does not move money: a job posting, a contacts page and legal text all live perfectly well on design system components.

The third lever is taking on the work you can genuinely do yourself. Copy from an internal expert often beats outsourced copywriting, catalogue population can go to a content manager at a lower rate, and factory photos can be shot in house. Just fix the deadlines: the saving turns into a loss when the build waits three weeks for your text while a paid team sits idle.

Now the savings that always come back with interest. The first is QA. Skipping it saves 8-12% of the budget and costs several times that later: a broken checkout for a week is lost revenue plus emergency fixes at rush rates. The second is discovery. A project without it starts faster and then gets rebuilt wholesale, because it turns out half the audience follows a different path entirely.

The third is the written spec. The temptation to work from reference sites and skip the paperwork is understandable on a small budget. But the spec is what defines the boundary of done, and without it every disagreement is settled by whoever argues harder. A proper spec costs 5-10% of the project. Not having one costs 20-50% in rework plus a thoroughly damaged working relationship. It is the most expensive saving on the list.

How to compare proposals without comparing incomparable things

Normalise every proposal into one table: stages, hours, rate, warranty scope, who owns content, what happens when requirements change. Once the quotes sit in the same coordinates, half the cheap options turn out to be more expensive because they contain no discovery, no QA and no support, and the other half turn out to be quotes for a different product entirely, with a template instead of design and no integrations.

Check separately what you end up owning: design source files, repository access, rights to the code, documentation, trained staff. A project that leaves you with an admin login and a developer phone number is cheaper precisely because you are renting access rather than buying a product. Changing vendors from that position costs about half a fresh build.

Last, do not ask for a portfolio. Ask for two or three projects in your niche with a story about what went wrong and how it was handled. That answer separates a team that works on products from a team that closes tickets. The first will tell you about the catalogue they rebuilt and the integration that broke. The second will tell you everything always goes to plan, which is the most alarming answer available.

Frequently asked questions

Related services

• Website development, end to endWe build sites that still hold up a year later: from a one-page CMS build to a store or a web application on React and Next.js. One team for design, code, integrations and launch.
• Landing page developmentOne page, one goal: the enquiry. We build the landing around a specific offer and the traffic you plan to send at it, whether that is search ads, paid social, organic or email.
• E-commerce developmentA store is not a shop window, it is an operational tool: catalogue, payments, delivery, stock and orders have to work as one. We build it so your team can run it without a developer.

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