A website in India costs between ₹5,000 and ₹5,00,000 or more, and for most small and mid-sized businesses the honest working number is ₹25,000 to ₹60,000 for a custom-designed site of seven to fifteen pages. Under ₹15,000 you are buying a ready-made template with your logo placed into it. Over ₹1,00,000 you are paying for a team, a design system and integrations, not for “a website”.
Every figure below excludes 18% GST. Web development is a taxable service in India under SAC 998314, so a quote of ₹25,000 is a bill of ₹29,500, and if your business is GST registered you can claim that tax back as input credit. A vendor who is vague about tax will usually be vague about scope as well.
The four price bands, and who each one is really for
₹5,000 – ₹15,000 — template site or solo freelancer
A purchased WordPress theme, a page builder, your logo, your photos, five to seven pages. It is real work; it is simply not design work. Delivery is two to seven days.
This band is the right choice far more often than agencies admit. If you run a local service business, your enquiries arrive on WhatsApp, and the site only has to prove you exist — services, address, photos, a phone number — then a template site plus a properly filled Google Business Profile does the job. Spending ₹50,000 instead will not, on its own, bring you more calls.
What goes wrong here: the same theme sits on hundreds of other sites, nobody writes your copy, page speed is poor because the builder loads everything on every page, and the developer often keeps the domain and hosting inside their own account. Settle that last point before you pay anything.
₹25,000 – ₹60,000 — small agency or a freelance team
Layouts designed for your business rather than adapted from a theme demo, seven to fifteen pages, forms that push enquiries into WhatsApp and email, on-page SEO basics, SSL, speed work, two or three revision rounds, and a support window of 30 to 90 days. One to three weeks, assuming your content is ready.
Most Indian businesses that genuinely need a website belong in this band, and rupee for rupee it returns the most. If you want to see what a seven-page build actually contains before you compare quotes, our page on small business websites lists it line by line.
₹1,00,000 – ₹5,00,000 — mid-sized agency
Twenty pages or more, a documented design system, an online store with real catalogue depth, integrations with a CRM, an ERP or Tally, more than one language, professional photography, a project manager and a proper QA pass. Six to twelve weeks with several people involved.
A large share of this band is process rather than pixels: discovery calls, wireframes, written approvals, a staging site, testing across devices. That process is worth paying for when five people must approve the homepage. It is a waste of your money when the only approver is you.
₹5,00,000 and above — enterprise and product builds
Here you are no longer buying a website. You are buying software with a public front: logins, roles, dashboards, payments, reporting, audit trails, often a mobile app beside it. It is scoped as sprints and billed against milestones, so the useful budgeting question is monthly burn, not a one-time price. That work is estimated differently — see custom software and app development for how those quotes are built.
The four bands side by side
| Band | Typical price (excl. GST) | What you get | Realistic timeline | Where it usually fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Template · solo freelancer | ₹5,000 – ₹15,000 | Bought theme, 5–7 pages, your own content | 2–7 days | Shared design, slow pages, logins not in your name |
| Small agency · freelance team | ₹25,000 – ₹60,000 | Custom layouts, 7–15 pages, forms into WhatsApp, on-page SEO | 1–3 weeks | Client content arrives late and stalls the build |
| Mid-sized agency | ₹1,00,000 – ₹5,00,000 | Design system, store or integrations, PM and QA | 6–12 weeks | Scope grows, approvals stall, cost drifts up |
| Enterprise · product build | ₹5,00,000 and above | Custom application, logins, payments, reporting | 3–6 months and beyond | Built in full before the requirement was tested |
What actually moves the price
- Page count. The first seven pages carry the design cost; after that each additional page is small work. ₹1,500 to ₹3,000 per extra page is normal in the first two bands.
- Custom design against a template. Drawing screens for your business instead of filling someone else’s theme typically adds 30 to 60 per cent. It is the single biggest honest difference between a ₹12,000 site and a ₹45,000 site.
- Selling online. A store adds payments, shipping, GST invoices, order emails and returns handling. Budget close to double a brochure site of the same page count, and remember that COD return-to-origin eats margin long after the build is paid for.
- Integrations. Every connection — payment gateway, WhatsApp Business API, Tally or Zoho, a CRM, a booking or inventory system — is a small project of its own. ₹10,000 to ₹50,000 each is the usual range.
- Content. Words and photographs are the most under-priced item in Indian quotes. If the vendor writes the copy and licenses images, that is genuine cost. If you supply them, you save money and you also become the bottleneck.
- SEO. On-page basics — titles, headings, schema, speed, a sitemap — belong inside the build and should not be an extra line. Monthly ranking work is a separate ongoing service; our SEO services page explains where that line sits.
- Ongoing. Updates, backups, uptime monitoring and small edits. Cheap to buy, expensive to skip.
The costs that are usually left out of the quote
The build price is rarely the whole spend. These are the items that appear after the invoice is signed, at Indian market rates.
| Item | Typical cost in India | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain (.com or .in) | ₹800 – ₹1,500 a year | The first year is often discounted; the renewal is not |
| Shared hosting | ₹3,000 – ₹12,000 a year | A VPS from roughly ₹1,000 a month once traffic or a store demands it |
| Business email | ₹1,200 – ₹2,500 per user a year | Google Workspace or Zoho Mail |
| SSL certificate | ₹0 | Let’s Encrypt is free and standard. Paying ₹5,000 for a basic certificate is wasted money |
| Theme and plugin licences | ₹5,000 – ₹20,000 a year | These renew annually; they are not a one-time purchase |
| Copywriting and photographs | ₹0 – ₹30,000 | Licensed stock, or a guided shoot on a good phone |
| Maintenance or care plan | ₹1,000 – ₹5,000 a month | Updates, backups, uptime, small edits |
| Payment gateway | About 2% of each transaction, plus 18% GST on that fee | UPI is normally free or close to it; cards and net banking are not |
| WhatsApp Business API | Billed by Meta per message, plus the platform fee | Only relevant if you automate notifications or run a shared inbox |
How to read a quote
Almost every dispute between an Indian business and its web developer comes from a handful of lines nobody wrote down. Before you approve anything, check that the document says all of this.
- Scope in numbers: “up to 7 pages”, not “a complete website”.
- Revisions defined: how many rounds, what counts as one round, and the rate once they are used up.
- Ownership: the domain, hosting, Search Console, Analytics and Google Business Profile created in your company’s name, with logins handed over on launch day.
- Platform named: WordPress, Shopify, Laravel, or something custom. “Latest technology” is not an answer.
- Content responsibility, with the date your text and photographs are due. Late content is the most common reason an Indian project slips by a month.
- Payment tied to milestones rather than calendar dates, so a delay on either side does not trigger a payment.
- What launch includes, and what day 31 costs once the free support window ends.
- GST shown as a separate line, not folded into a round number.
Six questions to ask any vendor
- Will the domain, hosting, Search Console and Analytics be in my company’s name, and will I have those logins on launch day?
- Exactly what counts as one revision round, and what do further changes cost?
- Who writes the text, and where do the photographs come from?
- Show me two sites you built that are live today, and tell me which parts of each you actually built.
- What does month two cost — hosting renewal, care plan, and the hourly or per-edit rate?
- If we stop working together, what do I receive: files, a database export, and admin access?
If a vendor cannot answer the first and the last question immediately, price is no longer the deciding factor.
What we charge, for comparison
So you have a real ladder to place against the bands above, here is ours. Codelith Lab builds a Business Website at ₹24,999 (up to 7 pages, mobile-first custom design, WhatsApp and click-to-call, contact form, on-page SEO basics, Google Business Profile link, SSL, speed and security, 2 revision rounds, 30 days support, 7–10 working days); Business Pro + SEO at ₹49,999 (up to 15 pages plus a blog, on-page SEO for 10 keywords, Search Console, Analytics and Business Profile setup, Core Web Vitals, lead forms into WhatsApp, 3 revision rounds, 60 days support, 2–3 weeks); an E-commerce Store at ₹99,999 (up to 100 products, Razorpay, PhonePe and UPI, Shiprocket or Delhivery, GST invoices, abandoned-cart WhatsApp recovery, 90 days support, 3–4 weeks); and Web App or SaaS work from ₹1,49,999 after a paid discovery sprint, with source code yours. Extras are listed openly: extra page ₹1,999 · blog setup ₹2,999 · logo and brand kit ₹3,499 · care plan ₹1,499 a month. All prices exclude 18% GST, payment is 50% to start and 50% at launch, and a GST invoice is issued at every milestone.
The limits of that ladder, stated plainly: fixed packages suit standard requirements, so an unusual build will either attract change fees or be moved into a paid discovery sprint — ask for that assessment before you pay the first instalment. Our office is in Pune and roughly six clients in ten are elsewhere in India, so reviews happen on Google Meet and daily updates on WhatsApp; if you want someone sitting across a table every week, hire locally instead. We were incorporated in 2025, so do not take our word for the quality — open a few of the 163 demo sites we keep live at codelithlabdemo.online on your own phone and judge the work directly. Those are demonstrations we built, not client sites. The full scope sits on our web development in India page.
The short version
- ₹25,000 to ₹60,000 is the honest band for a custom small-business website. Below ₹15,000 is a template; above ₹1,00,000 you are paying for a team.
- Add 18% GST, plus roughly ₹5,000 to ₹20,000 a year of running costs, to whatever build price you are quoted.
- Get the scope in page counts, revisions as a number, and every login in your own company’s name — in writing, before the first payment.
- If your enquiries already arrive through WhatsApp and a complete Google Business Profile, a cheap website is not a mistake. An expensive one might be.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a website cost in India in 2026?
Between ₹5,000 and ₹5,00,000, depending on who builds it and what it has to do. A template site from a freelancer runs ₹5,000 to ₹15,000, a custom small-business site ₹25,000 to ₹60,000, an agency build with a store or integrations ₹1,00,000 to ₹5,00,000, and anything with logins, dashboards and payments starts above ₹5,00,000. All of those exclude 18% GST.
Why do quotes for the same website vary from ₹10,000 to ₹80,000?
Because the word “website” covers very different work. The cheap quote is a bought theme filled with your content, usually with your text left to you. The expensive one includes designed layouts, written copy, licensed images, on-page SEO, speed work, testing and a support window. Compare the page count, revision rounds and support period, not the headline number.
Is GST charged on website development in India?
Yes. Web development is a service under SAC 998314 and attracts 18% GST, so a ₹24,999 package is billed at ₹29,499. If your business is GST registered you can normally claim that as input tax credit, which makes the real cost the base price. Ask for the tax as a separate line and insist on a proper GST invoice at each milestone.
What are the yearly running costs after the site is built?
Budget roughly ₹5,000 to ₹20,000 a year for a small business site: domain ₹800 to ₹1,500, shared hosting ₹3,000 to ₹12,000, business email ₹1,200 to ₹2,500 per user, and theme or plugin licence renewals. SSL should cost nothing. A care plan for updates, backups and small edits is extra, typically ₹1,000 to ₹5,000 a month.
Is a cheap template website ever the right choice?
Often, yes. If you sell locally, enquiries reach you on WhatsApp, and the site only has to confirm that you exist and list services, a template build plus a complete Google Business Profile is enough. Spend the saved money on photographs and reviews instead. Move up a band when the website itself has to generate leads, rank for search terms, or take payments.