Website costs for companies: prices, drivers and running costs

For a small or mid-sized company in Germany, a website costs somewhere between roughly €1,500 for a well-built one-pager and about €15,000 for a multi-page site with custom functionality. The difference is not the number of pages — it is what happens behind the contact form. Search for "website erstellen lassen Preis" or "Website Relaunch Kosten" and you will find quotes from €500 to €50,000, with no indication of what is actually included. This article sorts that range by project type, by the four cost drivers inside every quote, and by what comes back every single year.

What does a company website actually cost?

For a defined scope, the price can be fixed up front. The figures below are our own fixed prices, not market estimates: a one-pager is €1,499, a multi-page company site €2,999, a site with an intro film and scroll staging €4,999. Anything above that comes from functionality, not from design.

Project type	Scope	Fixed price	Live in
One-pager	single page, contact path, basic SEO	€1,499	7 days
Multi-page company site	five to twelve pages, own design, full SEO setup	€2,999	10 days
Brand production	intro film, motion, brand design, twelve months of SEO monitoring	€4,999	10 days
Website with custom functionality	booking, customer area, connection to existing software	from €2,500 on top	three to eight weeks
Website and marketing as an annual package	website, social media, ads, monthly reporting	from €6,738 in the first year	7 days

The range is open at the top but not at the bottom. Below roughly €1,500 you can put a page online — but not one that generates enquiries, holds up legally and can still be maintained two years from now. How many companies run a website at all is surveyed every year by the Federal Statistical Office in its survey on ICT usage in enterprises; the gap is widest among small firms, and that is exactly where budgets are tightest.

Current packages with the full list of deliverables are in our price overview. We work with fixed prices: the figure in the quote is the figure on the invoice, even when a build takes longer than planned.

Which four factors drive the price?

Four variables explain almost every price difference between two quotes for what looks like the same website. Once you know them, you can read a quote without understanding the technology.

1. How custom the design is. An adapted standard layout costs a fraction of a design drawn from scratch with motion elements. The difference is not taste but drafting time: an original layout needs a concept, a draft, review rounds and an implementation for every screen width.
2. Number and depth of pages. Not every page costs the same. Five sub-pages following one pattern are built quickly; a service page with its own argument, table and contact path is a small project in itself.
3. What sits behind the form. A contact form is an hour of work. Appointment booking with calendar sync, a customer area with logins, or a handover to an existing system is software development and is priced accordingly.
4. Content. Copy, photos and product data are the item almost everyone underestimates. Supply them yourself and you save four figures. Have them produced and you should budget half a working day per written page.

Multilingualism is the fifth driver, and the one most often forgotten. Every additional language extends not only the translation but every later change. Our own site runs in five languages — the upkeep is predictable, but it is not free.

How is the budget spread across the project phases?

Of every ten euros in the budget, roughly two go into concept and structure, four into design and build, two into content and two into engineering, testing and handover. That split surprises many clients, because the visible part — the design — is only one part.

The first phase decides all the others. If you settle up front which question the site should answer, who it addresses and what action stands at the end, you save several review rounds during the build. Skip that phase and you will later argue about colours when the real problem is the structure.

The last phase is the one most often cut, and it takes revenge fastest. It covers testing on real devices rather than in the design tool, behaviour on a weak mobile connection, checking every form through to the email that arrives, and redirects from old addresses. A site that never gets this round works on launch day and then quietly loses enquiries, with nobody making the connection.

What is inside the fixed price, and what comes on top?

The fixed price covers everything that belongs to the agreed scope: concept, design, build, server setup, handover. It does not cover services that depend on third parties — licences for fonts or images, advertising budgets, translations by specialist translators, and legal advice on your own contract texts.

Two items cause most of the additional invoices in practice. The first is a change of scope mid-project: "one page per service" turns into twelve pages instead of five. The second is missing material. As long as images and copy are missing, the project stands still, and a project standing still burns calendar time that nobody gets back.

What a finished result looks like in your industry is shown by our completed projects — from a single page for a trade business to a multilingual property site. What web design includes, and where the line to custom development runs, is set out on the service page.

What does the site cost after launch?

Once the site is live, €150 to €900 a year remain, depending on the setup, before anyone has even thought about visibility. The amounts are small next to the build, but they recur annually and cheap quotes tend to mention them only after the signature.

Running costs of website operation	Typical range per year	What happens without it
Domain	€10 to €40	The address lapses and can be registered by someone else
Hosting and certificate	€60 to €400	Slow loading, outages at peak times
Maintenance, updates, backups	€0 to €600	Security holes and, in an emergency, no way back
Keeping legal texts current	€0 to €300	Outdated details, errors that invite warning letters
Content upkeep by your own team	working hours instead of an invoice	The site visibly ages, enquiries drop off
Ongoing SEO support	from €499 per month	Visibility stays at the level of launch day

Whether you outsource maintenance or handle it yourself is arithmetic, not attitude. A maintenance contract costs money but no attention; doing it in-house costs no money but requires a person who feels responsible when the next security update appears. In small teams that person is usually already at capacity, and that is exactly where the gaps open that get exploited later.

These ranges come from our own project data from 2025 and 2026, not from a market survey. They describe businesses with a classic company website; a shop with inventory management sits well above them. If you want to build visibility actively, the scope of ongoing SEO support is on the service page — it is deliberately priced monthly, because one-off optimisation fades within half a year.

How much does a relaunch cost compared with a new build?

Expect seven tenths up to the full price of a new build — a relaunch is almost never the cheap option. The reason is uncomfortably simple: technology can be rebuilt, but legacy can only be carried over or cleaned up, and cleaning up is manual work.

A relaunch saves money elsewhere. Positioning, structure and image material already exist and only need reviewing. It gets expensive wherever grown structures are supposed to move along: old addresses that must redirect so visibility survives, content in a format no current system reads, or an interface someone once built without documentation.

A relaunch pays off when the site is costing you enquiries — long loading times on phones, a structure nobody can maintain, an appearance that no longer fits the company. It does not pay off when only the home page has stopped pleasing you. For that there is the partial rebuild, and it costs a fraction.

Which legal obligations belong in the budget?

Three obligations bear directly on the price: accessibility, provider identification and data protection. All three are cheaper when designed in from the start and expensive when retrofitted.

Since 28 June 2025 the German Accessibility Strengthening Act has been in force. It requires providers of certain consumer services to make their electronic offerings accessible — from contrast values and keyboard operation to usability with screen readers. Whether your site falls within scope, and which exemptions apply to micro-enterprises, is a question for legal review in case of doubt; the federal government provides an official overview of the act. In the budget this shows up as a low three-figure amount when it is planned from the beginning.

Provider identification moved in 2024 from the Telemedia Act into the Digital Services Act. If your legal notice still cites the old provision, change it; the required details are set out in section 5 DDG. The third point is data protection: the consent dialogue, the record of processing activities and the question of which services get embedded at all. Every external service you embed makes that list longer.

When is a custom web application worth it?

A custom application is worth it as soon as a recurring task in the business costs measurable time and no standard tool covers it. The threshold is lower than most assume: if two employees each spend an hour a day moving data between two systems, a budget of €2,500 to €8,000 pays for itself in under a year.

Typical cases from our work: a booking tool that pulls availability from the existing calendar; a customer area where documents are filed instead of emailed; a form that creates an enquiry directly as a record in the system you already run. The scope of that work is described under custom web applications.

Not every special request deserves its own software. If a standard tool covers the task 80 points out of 100, building your own is usually the more expensive answer — and we say so openly, even when it makes the project smaller. Where automation can shorten the effort, we described it in AI in web development.

How do you check a quote in ten minutes?

A solid quote answers six questions without you having to ask. A missing answer is not a detail — it is the place where the extra invoice will later appear.

1. Which pages are included by name, and what happens if one is added?
2. Who supplies copy and images, and by when?
3. How many review rounds are included?
4. What does operation cost in year two, including hosting and maintenance?
5. Who owns the source files, the domain and the access credentials after handover?
6. What response time applies when the site goes down?

A strikingly cheap quote is not automatically a bad one, but it moves the cost. If points four and five are missing, you pay the difference later — in operation, in a dispute over access, or with the next provider who first has to understand the site. So check those two before you compare prices.

Planning website costs realistically — mit ZeuZ IT

We build websites for small and mid-sized companies in Germany at a fixed price, usually within seven to ten days, and we say openly when a project does not justify the effort. What that means in your case can be settled in a short conversation — not in a quote form with twenty fields.

Describe in three sentences what your website should achieve and which deadline is running in the background. You will get back an assessment of the scope and a fixed price you can plan with.