Price is the first question every founder asks, and the honest answer is that it depends on four things: how many pages, how much custom design, how much motion, and who maintains it after launch. Here is how those levers actually move the number.
The three bands that cover most projects
$499 – $1,200: a focused static site. Five pages or fewer, a clear layout, a contact form, essential SEO, and a hosting set-up. This band buys you a credible presence — not a custom art direction, but far better than a theme you filled in yourself on a Sunday.
$1,999 – $4,000: a custom animated brand site. Ten pages, designed from scratch, scroll and hover motion, a CMS so your team can publish, and analytics wired properly. This is where most funded startups land. The extra money goes into the parts users feel: rhythm, typography, transitions, and copy structure.
$5,999 and up: bespoke. A one-of-one concept, scroll-driven storytelling, interactive product moments, a custom cursor and micro-interaction system, and performance tuning on top. This band is for sites where the website is the product demo — launch pages, flagship brand experiences, anything where the site has to prove capability rather than describe it.
What actually drives the price
Custom design versus adaptation. A theme adapted to your brand costs a fraction of an original system. But adaptation has a ceiling: every request that falls outside the theme becomes a fight with the theme. If your brand has a real point of view, design it.
Motion. Animation is where quotes quietly double. A fade-up on scroll is cheap. A pinned scene where a browser window zooms through into the next section — that requires a designer who understands timing and an engineer who understands scroll physics, and it takes days, not hours.
Integrations. A contact form is trivial. A booking system that syncs with a calendar, a payment flow, an inventory sync, or a CMS modelled around a 900-product catalogue are engineering tasks with testing attached.
Content. This is the line item people skip, then pay for later. If nobody writes your copy, the design has nothing to say. Photography, illustration and product data all cost money and time, and they arrive on your schedule, not ours.
Maintenance. A site without maintenance is a car without servicing. Budget for updates, monitoring and small changes — $100 to $400 a month is typical, and it is the cheapest way to avoid an emergency rebuild.
How to read a quote
A real quote breaks the project into phases with dates: scope, design, build, harden, ship. It names what is included and, more usefully, what is not. It states who owns the code and accounts. It has a payment schedule tied to milestones.
A padded quote hides behind a single number and a long list of vague deliverables. A suspiciously cheap quote means someone will spend forty hours on your project for $400, which means they will spend four.
What to ask before you sign
Ask who does the work — agency, freelancer or offshore team, and whether they are on the call. Ask what happens after launch, and what the support window covers. Ask to see a site they built eighteen months ago and check whether it is still fast. Ask what is excluded, because everything excluded is a future invoice.
Then decide based on what the site needs to do. If it needs to convert investors, hire engineers or sell a $4,000 product, the premium band pays for itself with a handful of conversions. If it needs to list your opening hours, it does not.
At leave it on us, every quote is fixed before work starts, broken into phases, and includes the parts most agencies leave out: domain, hosting, analytics, launch and a support window. You own the accounts and the code. See our pricing for the current bands, or start a project and we will scope yours in a day.