"How much does a website cost?" is the question I get first, and the hardest one to answer in a sentence. "It depends" is true and useless. So here is what quotes rarely spell out in full: what building a website really costs in 2026, what you get at each level, and where the money actually goes.
How much does a website cost: the short answer
For a small or medium business in Croatia, a serious custom website costs €500 to €2,000, depending on scope. Below that you're generally talking about a template. Above it, it's no longer a website but a web application (a web shop with a database, a customer portal, a booking system), and there the range starts at €1,400.
Those figures are mine and are broken down on the website pricing page. They're not a market average: you'll find offers at €145 and offers at €8,000 for something that reads the same on paper.
Website pricing by level
Business card site: from €500
One to five pages. Typically: a sole trader or a small company that needs a presence, contact details, a few photos and an enquiry form.
What's included:
- A design made for you, not a bought template.
- Hand-coded in React or Next.js, built for phones.
- Basic SEO: meta tags, structured data, sitemap, robots.txt.
- A contact form connected to your email.
- Analytics set up.
- Domain, DNS and going live.
- 30 days of support after launch.
Timeline: 1 to 2 weeks.
Site with subpages: from €800
Six to fifteen pages, a blog, separate service pages, often two languages.
On top of everything above:
- Multiple languages, usually Croatian and English, with correct
hreflangtags. - Content you can edit yourself.
- A blog with individual post pages.
- Extended structured data:
LocalBusiness,Article,FAQPage. - Speed tuned to 95+ on mobile Lighthouse.
- 30 days of support.
Timeline: 3 to 4 weeks.
Bookings, web shop, portal: from €1,400
The moment a site has to remember something (orders, bookings, customer accounts) it becomes a web application and the maths changes. A database, user login, payments, an admin side, testing real payments. A site with bookings or customer accounts starts at €1,400, a web shop at €1,500, and larger catalogues and integrations go above €3,000. Timeline: 5 to 8 weeks.
White Sail Split is roughly in this group: boat tour bookings with its own admin, without a middleman taking a commission.
What you're actually paying for when you pay for a website
Most people imagine they're paying for "coding". That's about 30% of the time. The rest:
- Understanding the business and planning (~10%): what the company does, who the customers are, which pages should exist at all.
- Design (~25%): the look, iterations, mobile versions.
- Build (~30%): writing the code, optimising images, structured data.
- Testing and speed (~15%): testing across browsers and real devices, tuning loading, the long tail of small fixes.
- Going live (~5%): DNS, analytics, handover.
- Reserve after launch (~15%): initial support and whatever always comes up.
When an agency asks €6,000 for the same scope, the difference usually isn't in what you get, but in the overhead you pay for: project managers, sales, an office.
Hidden costs quotes usually don't mention
The quote covers the build. A site also has costs that carry on:
- Hosting: €0 to €30 a month. For a small business's traffic, Vercel and Cloudflare Pages are free.
- Domain: €10 to €20 a year.
- Business email on your own domain: €5 to €10 per mailbox per month.
- A database, if there is one: free for small amounts, around €25 a month after that.
- Payment fees in a web shop: around 1.4% + €0.25 per transaction.
- Content changes: your time or development hours.
- Small fixes through the year: €100 to €300.
A site on a modern stack costs practically nothing to run. WordPress with plugin licences, security updates and shared hosting easily reaches €300 to €600 a year just to stay standing. More on that in why WordPress is slow.
Why the same "website" costs €300 and €5,000
Because "website" covers a very wide range:
- A WordPress template, €150 – €500. It looks like someone else's site, it's slow, hard to change and more expensive to keep in the long run.
- A design bought separately and sent off to be built, €500 – €900. A better look, usually worse code underneath.
- A developer or small team doing design, build, SEO and going live, €500 – €2,000. That's what I do.
- An agency, €3,000 – €8,000. A similar result, more overhead.
Which level makes sense depends on how much work the site carries. If it's secondary, take a template. If customers decide from it whether to call you, it's worth investing properly.
Owning the code changes the maths
This is the part that rarely gets compared, and it changes the price over several years.
The code I write is yours. No monthly subscription for the site itself, no per-user fees, no situation where your data stays locked in with a vendor. If tomorrow you want someone else to take over the site, they get the repository and carry on.
On subscription platforms a €30-a-month site costs €1,800 over five years, and at the end of those five years you own nothing. The same site built once, owned by you, costs over the same period what the build cost plus hosting.
A more detailed comparison is in Wix and Squarespace vs a custom build.
Frequently asked questions about website costs
How much does it cost to maintain a website per year?
On a modern stack €50 to €350 a year, mostly the domain and the odd small fix. Hosting is free for most small sites.
Is WordPress cheaper?
At the start yes, over three years usually not. Plugin licences, hosting that has to be stronger because everything is slower, and the time spent on updates.
How long does it take to build a website?
One to two weeks for a business card site, three to four for a site with subpages, five to eight if it has bookings or payments. Most of the waiting is usually not on my side but on the content: texts and photos.
Is everything paid up front?
No. 25% at the start, 75% when the work is done. The price is fixed and agreed before work starts, not an hourly estimate that grows along the way.
Do you work outside Split?
Yes. I work with clients across Croatia and abroad, online or in person; see my work.
How to get a concrete figure
The range in this post is useful for planning, but your project has its own scope. I give a concrete, fixed price after a short call where we go through what the site needs to do, free and with no obligation.
Tell me what you're building or see the website pricing broken down by level.