The most common assumption we hear is that hiring a designer is expensive and doing it yourself is cheaper. It is worth doing the arithmetic, because that is rarely what it adds up to — and the answer is different again depending on what your business actually needs.
What a builder really costs
- Twenty to fifty euros a month is a normal range, which is €1,200 to €3,000 over five years — for one site
- The domain is often registered through the builder, which makes moving away a two-week argument
- Your time is the cost nobody invoices. Doing it properly takes evenings and the occasional Sunday
- The moment you need something the tool does not do, you either live with it or start again
- And the result looks like everyone else's, because everyone is using the same templates
There is one more line on that list which catches businesses here more than most: a builder site with analytics, a booking widget and a couple of embeds, and no proper consent layer under the GDPR and the LSSI, is a real exposure rather than a technicality. Adding it properly afterwards is a project.
What a custom build costs
For a single focused page — one clear offer, your own photographs, your prices, a way to get in touch — we build from €119. That is not a website in the full sense, and we will say so; it is the honest starting point for a business that needs to exist online and nothing more.
A real small business site — five pages, written properly, photographed properly, in two languages, with a booking route and search set up correctly — runs from around €600 to €2,500. An online shop runs from €1,500 to €6,000. One payment, owned outright, on a domain in your name, with a quotation that says what it includes.
When a builder is genuinely the right call
Genuinely, sometimes. Two pages, one form, a business that is not trying to be found in search, no languages beyond one, and an owner who enjoys the work and has the evenings for it. In that situation a builder is a perfectly sensible choice and we will say so rather than sell you against it.
The middle, which is where most businesses end up
Most of the businesses we work with started small and grew into the site they have now. Launch the pages that matter, watch what people actually use, and reinvest in the site as it earns. On this coast that usually means building in the quiet months, when the work can be done properly and the summer is left for trading.