Custom business website cost in India (2026): honest pricing bands

Why the answer is a range, not a number

“How much does a website cost?” is the most-asked question in Indian web development, and every honest answer starts the same way: a one-page contact form and a multi-tenant SaaS with payments are both called “websites,” and they sit 100x apart in cost. Multiple 2026 pricing guides converge on the same conclusion — cost follows scope (design, content, engineering, integrations), not page count.

The useful way to budget is by band. Across four independent 2026 guides we reviewed (Deseno, buildbyRaviRai, OrangeMantra, and Nurotech), the ranges for each website type agree within roughly 30 percent — close enough to plan with. The rest of this article is those bands, the recurring costs quotes tend to hide, and the red flags that predict a bad engagement.

One more framing point before the numbers: a website that generates leads or sales is a revenue asset, not a cost line. Delhi-based agency Nurotech puts it bluntly — underspending on an ecommerce build directly suppresses sales. The goal is not the cheapest site; it is the cheapest site that does the job.

Portfolio and small business sites (₹15k–3L)

At the bottom of the market, a freelancer portfolio or single-location business site runs ₹8,000–25,000 for template work and ₹20,000–60,000 with custom design, mobile responsiveness, a contact flow, and basic SEO, per Nurotech's city-level data. A services SMB site (10–20 pages, lead capture, GST-aware content) typically lands at ₹40,000–1,50,000.

What changes between the bottom and top of this band is not decoration — it is whether anyone thought about conversion. A ₹20,000 template site lists your services. A ₹1,00,000 professional site structures them around the questions buyers actually ask, with a fast mobile experience and a contact path that gets answered. Our business portfolio website guide covers what that structure looks like.

Watch for one trap in this band: quotes that exclude content. Many low quotes assume you supply final text and photos. Professional copywriting and photography can add ₹15,000–60,000 — ask explicitly.

Ecommerce stores (₹1.5L–12L+)

Ecommerce is where budgets stretch. A Shopify or WooCommerce store with a customized theme and clean catalogue starts around ₹1.5–4 lakh. A custom-designed D2C store with content, payment and shipping integrations, and a conversion-led checkout runs ₹4–12 lakh. Headless builds (Next.js storefront on a commerce backend) start around ₹8 lakh and reach ₹30 lakh for high-SKU, omnichannel setups, according to Riolabz's 2026 breakdown.

SKU count is the multiplier nobody expects. Nurotech's numbers put a store with up to 200 products at ₹80,000–3,00,000, while 200–2,000 products with advanced filtering, inventory management, and multi-payment support runs ₹2,00,000–8,00,000. Catalogue data entry, variant logic, and GST-correct invoicing are real engineering, not admin work.

Payment integration is usually a line item: ₹5,000–15,000 of development per gateway (Razorpay, PayU, CCAvenue), plus ongoing transaction fees of 1.9–3.5 percent. Our Razorpay integration guide details the 2026 fee structure — including the UPI zero-MDR nuance that surprises many merchants.

Custom web apps and SaaS (₹3L–50L+)

Custom web applications — booking platforms, dashboards, internal tools, marketplaces — do not follow website pricing logic at all. You are paying for backend architecture, databases, authentication, and business rules. OrangeMantra puts budgets starting near ₹3,00,000 and passing ₹25,00,000 depending on user roles and integrations; a serious SaaS MVP runs ₹1–5 lakh on the lean end and ₹5–25 lakh+ for production multi-tenant builds.

Timelines scale the same way: 4–10 weeks for a simple tool, 8–16 weeks for a scoped MVP, 12–28 weeks for complex or AI-heavy products. Our custom web app from scratch guide walks through the full phase-by-phase delivery model, including why post-launch iteration typically adds 20–40 percent of the initial budget in the first six months.

City, vendor tier, and why quotes vary 4x for the same brief

The same five-page business brief can come back at ₹25,000 from a solo freelancer, ₹90,000 from a small studio, and ₹3,00,000 from a large agency. All three can be “fair” prices for genuinely different products. Freelancers quote 25–40% below studio bands because you are buying one person's time without discovery, project management, or support structure. Large agencies charge 2–4x studio rates because you are buying account layers, offices, and process overhead alongside the work.

City matters less than it used to. Metro agencies carry higher base rates, but remote-first studios in cities like Pune deliver metro-grade work at meaningfully lower cost structures. What actually predicts quality is not geography but process: does the vendor run a discovery, write a scope with milestones, show you live demos during the build, and put support terms in writing? Those four behaviors separate reliable vendors from lottery tickets at every price point.

The practical move when comparing quotes: normalize them. Ask each vendor to itemize design, development, content, integrations, hosting setup, and the first year of maintenance separately. Lump-sum quotes are impossible to compare; line items reveal immediately who is pricing real work and who is pricing a template install as if it were custom.

A worked example: a 12-page services site in Pune

Make the bands concrete. A 12-page services business site — homepage, six service pages, about, case studies, blog, contact — with custom design, WhatsApp and email contact paths, basic SEO structure (metadata, schema, sitemap), and sub-2.5s mobile loads: this sits squarely in the ₹60,000–3,00,000 professional band. At ₹80,000 from a freelancer you get the pages; at ₹1,80,000 from a studio you get the pages plus discovery, copy support, performance budget, schema, launch checks, and support.

Year-one total cost of ownership tells the fuller story: add hosting (~₹3,000–10,000), domain (~₹1,000), business email (~₹1,500–5,000), and maintenance at 15–25% of build (₹12,000–45,000). The ₹80,000 site really costs ~₹1,00,000 in year one; the ₹1,80,000 studio site ~₹2,20,000 with everything handled. Neither is wrong — but they are different products, and knowing which one you are buying is the entire point of the bands.

Payment plans, phases, and protecting yourself

How you pay matters as much as how much. The healthy structure for Indian web projects is milestone-linked payments: an advance to book the build (typically 30–40%), a mid-point payment at design approval or first working demo (30–40%), and the balance at launch handover (20–30%). Avoid 100% advances at any price point, and be equally wary of vendors who ask for nothing upfront — someone with no commitment from you has no commitment to you either.

Phasing is the other lever for tight budgets: launch the core site in phase one and stage the rest (blog, case studies, integrations) as revenue justifies. A ₹3,00,000 full build often decomposes into a ₹1,50,000 phase one that starts generating leads, with phases two and three funded by the results. This is how we structure most small-business engagements at the studio — momentum beats perfection deferred.

Finally, put ownership in writing: domain and hosting accounts in your name, admin access to everything, source code or a handover arrangement on project completion, and a defined support window (30 days of bug fixes is the professional baseline). The cheapest quote that leaves you locked out of your own site is the most expensive option on the table.

How we price at Amitra Labs

We do not publish a rate card, because scoped work is honest work. Our path is Discover → Scope → Ship: we map your goals and constraints, then write a scope with milestones, ownership, and success criteria before a rupee is committed. The bands above tell you where your project likely sits; the scope tells you exactly what it will cost.

If you are budgeting for 2026, the fastest next step is a short WhatsApp thread with your goals, must-haves, and timeline via our contact page. We reply with clarifying questions and a scoped estimate — typically within one business day. For a sense of what the work looks like, browse our services and the live builds on our projects page.