A website in India in 2026 costs between ₹25,000 and ₹1,50,000, and an app starts at ₹1,00,000. Those are our published bands, and the rest of this post is about what decides where in them you land — because the number nobody tells you is not the price, it is the reason for the price.
Almost every agency page on this topic ends in "contact us for a quote". That is not caution, it is an anchoring tactic: once you have spent twenty minutes on a call, a number that would have looked high in print looks negotiated. We would rather you knew before the call.
The bands, and what each one actually contains
| What you are buying | Band | Typical build |
|---|---|---|
| Business site — 6–15 pages, blog, editable content, technical SEO, enquiry routing, analytics | ₹25,000 – ₹50,000 | about 7 days |
| Commerce site — everything above plus catalogue, cart, payment gateway, orders and inventory, customer accounts | ₹60,000 – ₹1,00,000 | about 14 days |
| Platform — B2B and B2C together, dealer logins and tiered pricing, admin dashboard and roles, third-party integrations | ₹1,00,000 – ₹1,50,000 | about 28 days |
| App, one platform — Android or iOS, backend, admin panel, store submission | ₹1,00,000 – ₹1,50,000 | about 35 days |
| App, Android + iOS — both stores, shared backend with the site, in-app payments | ₹1,50,000 – ₹2,50,000 | about 56 days |
| Product build — the software the business sells: accounts, payments, customer dashboard, admin, integrations | ₹3,50,000 – ₹10,00,000 | 9–16 weeks, in milestones |
One year of hosting is included with every website. Terms are 25% to start and the balance on delivery.
The last row is a different kind of purchase from the rest, and the difference is not size. Everything above it is a business presenting itself. A product build is the software the business sells — if it stops working the company has no product, not a broken website. That is why a funded startup pays four times what a twelve-page manufacturer site costs for something that can look smaller from the outside. It is also always quoted in milestones: each one ships something you can judge, you pay after it ships, and you can stop at any boundary and keep the code.
The single thing that moves you between the first five bands is not page count and not design quality. It is how much of the work is building software versus presenting a business. A twelve-page site for a manufacturer with beautiful photography is a business site. A six-page site where one of the pages lets a dealer log in and see their own pricing is a platform, and it costs four times as much, because the login, the roles and the pricing rules are software.
Why the same brief gets quoted ₹12,000 and ₹1,20,000
Both quotes are usually honest. They are just for different things.
At ₹12,000 somebody is installing a theme, replacing the demo text with yours, and handing it over. It will look fine in a screenshot. What it will not have is a sensible URL structure, structured data, an enquiry that reliably reaches your phone, or anybody to call when it breaks in eight months. There is a real market for that, and if your budget is genuinely ₹12,000 it is a more honest option than a badly-executed ₹40,000 site.
At ₹1,20,000 somebody has read "customers should be able to order" and priced a catalogue, a cart, a payment gateway, order states, and an admin panel to manage it all.
So before comparing two quotes, make them comparable. Ask each person to write down, in a list, what exists at the end. Nine times out of ten the price gap stops being mysterious in about thirty seconds.
The costs that are not in the quote
These are what turn a ₹40,000 website into a ₹60,000 year, and they are left out of most proposals — not always dishonestly, but consistently.
The domain. A .com or .in is a few hundred to about ₹1,200 a year. Small,
but it should be in your account, registered in your name. A domain sitting
in your developer's account is the most common way small businesses lose control
of their own website.
Hosting from year two. Included for the first year here; budget for it after that. For a business site it is not a large number, but it is a number.
Content. This is the one that actually bites. Photographs of your real premises, your real team and your real products are worth more to conversion than any design decision, and they cost either money or a day of your time. Stock photos of a generic office are the tell that nobody took the business seriously. If you have no photographs, budget for a photographer before you budget for an extra page.
Changes after launch. Small edits are usually a phone call. A new section, a new integration, a redesign — those are new work. Ask what counts as which before you sign, not the first time you want something changed.
When you should not pay anybody to build a website
We would rather say this than sell you something you do not need.
If you sell entirely on WhatsApp and Instagram and you are busy, a website is not your bottleneck. Sort out a Google Business Profile first — it is free, it takes an afternoon, and for a local business it produces more enquiries than a new website will in its first six months. We wrote about why in a website that actually ranks locally.
If you cannot yet describe who your customer is in one sentence, a website built now will be rewritten in four months. That is not a failure of the website, it is the business figuring itself out, and it is cheaper to do that without a ₹40,000 asset getting in the way.
If you need it purely for credibility on a single deal, a one-page site with your registration details, your work and a phone number does that job. It sits at the bottom of the first band, and it is a legitimate thing to buy.
If the brief is "I want it to look like Apple's website", get a number before you get excited. Heavy 3D and scroll-driven animation is real engineering, and it belongs in the ₹1,00,000+ conversation. It cannot be done properly for ₹12,000 by anyone, at any agency, anywhere — and a quote that says otherwise is describing a different website than the one in your head.
How to tell whether a quote is serious
A serious quote has four things in it: what exists at the end, how long it takes, what you have to provide, and what happens after launch. A quote with only a number and a duration has not been thought about, and the thinking is the part you are actually paying for.
Two more signals worth weighing. A builder who asks what your customers search for before asking how many pages you want is thinking about outcomes. And a builder who tells you, unprompted, which part of your brief is not worth doing is a builder you can trust with the parts that are — the same test applies when buying leads, and for the same reason.
If your scope and content are genuinely settled, the build itself is fast; we have written about what has to be true for 48 hours to be real. Waiting for content, not writing code, is what stretches a one-week project into six.
If you want a number for your specific case rather than a band, tell us what you need — including your budget. Naming it does not raise the quote. It decides whether there is a project at all, and finding that out in one message is better for both of us than finding it out in week three.