What does a website actually cost in India?

Ask five people what a website costs in India and you will get five answers between ₹3,000 and ₹5,00,000. All five can be honest. The number depends almost entirely on what is actually being built — and on how much of your money goes into the site rather than into the office that sold it to you.

Here is the plain version, with real numbers.

₹3,000 – ₹5,000: a template with your name on it

At this price nobody is designing anything. You are buying a ready-made theme with your business name typed in and your photos dropped into the existing slots.

Sometimes that is genuinely fine — if you need any presence at all by next week, it beats nothing. But go in knowing what you are getting:

• It will look like several thousand other sites
• It is often on a subdomain (yourbusiness.something.com) that you do not own
• Speed is usually poor, because themes load code for features you will never use
• Support tends to end the day it is handed over

Worth it when: you need a placeholder immediately and will replace it later.

₹10,000 – ₹20,000: a proper small business site

This is where custom work starts. Around five pages, designed for your business rather than adapted from a template, working properly on a phone, with enquiries reaching you somewhere you will actually see them.

What you should expect at this price:

• A custom design, not a theme
• Mobile-first, tested on real phones
• Contact form or WhatsApp enquiry that works
• Your own domain, registered in your name
• Basic SEO — titles, descriptions, sitemap
• Google Business Profile set up

Our Starter package sits here at ₹12,000. Vinayak Hospital is exactly this build, so you can judge for yourself what the money buys.

₹40,000 – ₹80,000: a full organisational site

Hospitals, schools, larger showrooms — anything with real structure. Many departments, staff profiles, packages, notices, galleries, often two languages.

The jump in price is not padding. It is genuinely several times the content to organise, write, structure and maintain — plus the deeper SEO work a larger site needs to be findable section by section.

Our Premium package is ₹55,000. Agarwal Nursing Home and Shri Krishna School are both this tier.

₹1,00,000 – ₹5,00,000+: agencies and real platforms

Two very different things live in this bracket.

Genuine platforms — anything with logins, payments, dashboards, live tracking. This is software, not a website, and it costs what software costs. Fair enough.

Agency overhead — the same five-page site you could get for ₹15,000, quoted at ₹1,50,000 because it passes through a salesperson, a project manager, a designer, a developer and an account manager, all of whom need paying.

The test is simple: ask what the site will actually do. If the answer is "five pages and a contact form", the price should not have six digits.

The costs nobody mentions in the quote

Three recurring costs exist whatever you pay for the build. Ask about all three before you agree to anything.

Domain — ₹800 to ₹1,200 a year

Your .com or .in. Small money, but ask one question that matters enormously: whose name is it registered in? Some agencies keep the domain in their own name. When you later want to move, you discover you do not own your own address. Insist it is yours.

Hosting — ₹2,000 to ₹6,000 a year

Where the site lives. Cheap hosting is slow hosting, and slow sites lose visitors and rank worse. This is not the line to save ₹1,500 on.

Maintenance — the one people forget

A website is not a poster you print once. Timings change, offers end, staff move on, browsers and security keep moving. Sites without maintenance quietly rot: broken forms, expired certificates, a phone number three years out of date.

Two models exist. Pay per change (₹500–₹2,000 each), which in practice means the site never gets updated because you cannot face the invoice. Or a monthly plan — ours is ₹1,000 or ₹7,000 depending on package — covering hosting, SSL, backups, security and unlimited content edits.

How to tell if you are being overcharged

Five questions. Ask them of anyone quoting you, including us.

1. "Can I see something you built that is live right now?" Not screenshots — a URL you can open. If they cannot produce one, stop there.
2. "Will the domain be in my name?" The only acceptable answer is yes.
3. "What happens after launch?" Vagueness here means you are on your own the day it goes live.
4. "Is this custom or a template?" Both are legitimate. Being charged custom prices for a template is not.
5. "Can I see it before I pay?" Our whole model is built on this, and we think it is the fairest question a buyer can ask.

What we charge, and why we publish it

Two packages, both on the pricing page where anyone can read them:

• Starter — ₹12,000 one-time, then ₹1,000/month
• Premium — ₹55,000 one-time, then ₹7,000/month

We publish them because the alternative — "contact us for a quote" — usually means the price depends on how much the seller thinks you can pay. That is not a conversation we want to have with anyone.

And before any of it, we build your site and put it online for free. You open it on your own phone and decide then. Three of the five sites in our portfolio started exactly that way.

The short version

Whatever you decide, get the domain in your name and get someone to show you a live URL. Those two habits will save you more than any negotiation.