What actually moves the price
Visual design is rarely the expensive part. The cost sits in scope and in content: how many distinct page types there are, whether anyone has written the copy, whether the site has to talk to another system, and whether there is an application behind it or just pages.
| Factor | Low end | What pushes it up |
|---|---|---|
| Page types | One template, a handful of pages | Many distinct layouts, each needing its own design and build |
| Content | Copy and images ready to go | Content has to be written, sourced, or migrated from an old site |
| Integrations | A contact form that emails you | Booking, payments, CRM, inventory, or a customer login |
| Application logic | None — it is a website | Accounts, dashboards, workflows: this is software, priced as software |
| Migration | New domain, clean start | Existing traffic, URLs, email and DNS that must survive the cutover |
This is why a flat price quoted before discovery is a warning sign rather than a convenience. Either the provider is assuming the simplest version of your project and will re-quote later, or they are padding for the worst case and you are paying for someone else's uncertainty.
The costs that do not stop at launch
The build is a one-time number. Running the site is not, and this is where sites quietly fail — not because the design was wrong, but because a certificate expired or nobody was managing DNS when the email broke.
| Item | Starting price | What happens without it |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting (cPanel) | $9.99 / month | No site |
| Domain registration | $15 / year | The address stops resolving — and can be bought by someone else |
| SSL certificate | $35 | Browsers warn visitors the site is not secure |
| Business email on your domain | Included with hosting | Mail from a generic address, and deliverability problems nobody owns |
Questions that make two quotes comparable
- What exactly is in scope: how many page types, and who is writing the content?
- What does the estimate assume about integrations, and what happens to the price if one is added?
- Who hosts it after launch, who renews the SSL, and who fixes the contact form when it stops sending?
- Do I own the site, the domain, and the source at the end of the project?
- If my current site has traffic, who is responsible for the URLs and the email surviving the cutover?
- What is the hourly rate behind this estimate?
That last one is worth asking even when the work is quoted as a fixed project. A provider who publishes a rate — Nubinity's is $98 per hour — is telling you how the estimate was built. A provider who will not give you one is asking you to trust a number with no arithmetic behind it.
The redesign conversation deserves the same scepticism in the other direction. Plenty of sites that feel dated have a structure and content problem rather than a visual one, and a rebuild that keeps the same confusing navigation will not perform any better than what it replaced.