Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five numbers between ₹8,000 and ₹3,00,000, none of them explained. That is not because anyone is lying. It is because “a website” describes a one-page brochure and a 500-product store equally well, and nobody wants to publish a number you might hold them to.

So here is the version nobody sends you: the actual brackets, what genuinely sits inside each one, and the six things that decide which bracket your project lands in.

The four brackets

₹8,000 – ₹20,000 — a template, configured

At this price you are buying setup labour on a theme somebody else designed. A WordPress or Wix template, your logo dropped in, your text pasted over the placeholder text, five or six pages, a contact form.

This is not a scam and it is not always the wrong answer. If you need a web address that looks respectable before a trade show next month, it is the right answer.

What you are not buying: a layout built around your business, anything custom, page-speed work, or a developer who will still be reachable in eight months. The theme will have features you never use, and those features are code the browser downloads anyway.

Worth it when: you need presence, not performance. A single location. No online selling.

₹20,000 – ₹60,000 — a real business site, or a starter store

The working bracket for most Indian SMBs. Custom layout, your own structure, mobile-first, proper on-page SEO, a form that reaches you, and — at the top of the range — a functioning store.

For reference, our own Starter E-commerce Package sits at ₹24,000 and is itemised line by line: design and build across the eight pages a store needs, product upload for up to 50 items, inventory management, a payment gateway, delivery setup, and an admin panel you can actually use. Mobile responsiveness, basic SEO, SSL and WhatsApp integration are included rather than billed as extras.

Worth it when: the website has a job — take enquiries, take orders, rank for something.

₹60,000 – ₹2,00,000 — custom build

Now you are paying for thinking, not just building. Original design rather than a layout adapted, a proper content structure, integrations with what you already run — Tally, a CRM, a booking system, an ERP. Multiple user roles. Performance budgets that are measured rather than promised.

Worth it when: the website is a channel, not a brochure. When downtime costs money.

₹2,00,000+ — platform work

Marketplaces, portals, anything with logins and dashboards and its own business logic. This is software with a website attached, and it is priced like software.

The six things that move the number

Everything above is a range because six variables decide where inside it you land.

1. Page count, but only sort of

Everyone asks “how many pages?” and it is the least useful question. Ten pages of the same template is one design and nine copies. Three pages that each behave differently is three designs.

What actually costs money is the number of distinct layouts, not the number of URLs.

2. Whether you are selling

A store is a different animal. Payment gateway integration, order flow, inventory, shipping rules, tax handling, order emails, a refund path. Each of those is a thing that has to work when a stranger’s money is involved.

Adding a cart to a brochure site is not a feature. It is a second project.

3. Who is writing the words

This is the single most common reason projects stall, and it almost never appears in the quote.

If you are supplying the copy, the build waits on you. If the agency is writing it, that is real work and it should be a line in the quote. If nobody has decided, the site launches with placeholder text nobody replaces.

Decide this before you sign anything.

4. Where the photographs come from

Same problem, more visible. A site built around stock photography looks like every other site built around the same stock library, and the good stock is not free.

This is the one place we have an unusual answer: because BPS Network is the digital arm of Beyond Pixel Studio, the cameras, the crew and the 3D suite are in-house. Product shots, interiors, team photographs and video are not a vendor we hire on your behalf with a markup — they are the same building.

For most agencies, photography is a line item they subcontract. Ask where yours is coming from before the build starts, not after.

5. What happens to it afterwards

A website is not furniture. Plugins update, certificates expire, PHP versions get deprecated, and someone has to add the new product line in March.

Two honest options: an annual maintenance contract, or full admin access plus a walkthrough so your team does it. Both are fine. What is not fine is discovering in month seven that neither was arranged.

Ours is ₹8,000/year and optional, and hosting with domain runs about ₹7,873/year — the numbers are published because they should be.

6. Whether SEO is in scope

“Basic SEO” and “SEO” are different products, and the gap between them is where most disappointment lives.

Basic on-page SEO — title tags, meta descriptions, semantic headings, schema markup, an XML sitemap, fast loading, Search Console submission — should be included in any build. If it is not, the agency is shipping you a site Google struggles to read.

SEO as a service — keyword research, content, link building, monthly iteration — is a retainer, not a build task. It takes months. Anyone quoting it inside a two-week website build is quoting the first thing and calling it the second.

What a quote should look like

If a quote is one number, you cannot negotiate it — you can only accept or reject it. If it is itemised, you can move things.

An itemised quote lets you say “drop the blog for now” and see the number change. That is the difference between a proposal and a price tag.

Ours looks like this, and every line is separately priced:

Design and development — home, listing, detail, cart, checkout, contact, about, policy pages
Product management — upload, categorisation, pricing, variations
Stock and inventory management
Payment gateway integration
Delivery and shipping setup
Admin panel
Logo and banner design
Mobile responsive design, basic SEO, security, WhatsApp integration

Five questions worth asking any agency

Is this quote itemised? If not, ask for it itemised. The answer tells you a lot.
Who writes the copy, and is it in this number?
Where do the photographs come from?
What exactly does “SEO included” mean here?
Do I own the domain, the hosting and the source files? The answer should be yes to all three, in writing.

That last one matters more than people expect. If the agency holds the domain, changing agencies means asking permission.

How long it takes

For a standard business site or a starter store: 10 to 20 working days from sign-off, assuming content arrives on time. Content is almost always what makes it longer.

Terms in this market are typically 50% advance and 50% on completion. Ours are.

Where to start

Work out which bracket you are in before you talk to anyone. If you are not selling online and you have one location, you are probably in the second bracket and anyone quoting you ₹1.5 lakh should explain why.

We publish our starter package price for exactly this reason — so the conversation starts at what it includes rather than at what it costs.

We build for clients across India from our studio in Bhubaneswar, and everything above except a photo shoot happens remotely.

What a business website actually costs in India — and what changes the number