Ask three developers to quote the same website and you can get R2 000, R18 000 and R80 000 back. All three might be honest. They are just quoting different things — and unless you know what sits behind each number, there is no way to compare them.
Here is what actually moves the price, what you should expect to pay every month afterwards, and the questions that will tell you very quickly whether a quote is realistic.
The once-off build
Most small business sites in South Africa fall into three bands. These are the ranges we see quoted around the market, not a rate card:
- Under R5 000. Usually a template with your logo and colours dropped in. Fine for a placeholder. You are buying someone's time to fill in a theme, not design work.
- R5 000 – R25 000. The realistic band for a designed, multi-page site for a real business. Custom layout, your content, payments if you need them, set up so you can edit it yourself.
- R25 000 and up. Larger builds — big catalogues, membership areas, bookings tied into other systems, or anything coded from scratch rather than assembled.
What pushes a site up a band is rarely the number of pages. It is the number of things the site has to do. A fifteen-page brochure site is far simpler than a three-page site that takes payments, issues confirmations and syncs to a booking calendar.
What you are actually paying for
A website quote is mostly labour, and the labour splits roughly like this:
- Working out what it needs to do. The unglamorous part, and the part that stops you paying twice.
- Design. Either drawn for your brand, or picked off a shelf. This is the single biggest difference between a R4 000 site and a R15 000 one.
- Build. Turning that into something that works on a phone as well as a laptop.
- Integrations. Payments, forms, email, bookings, maps. Each one is real work, and each one is a place a cheap quote quietly leaves a gap.
- Setup. Domain, hosting, certificates, search console, analytics. Usually invisible until it is missing.
The monthly costs nobody mentions
This is where people get caught. The build is once-off; the site is not. Every website has running costs, and if a quote does not list them, ask.
- Domain. A .co.za is inexpensive, renewed yearly. Make sure it is registered in your name, not your developer's.
- Hosting. Shared hosting is cheap. Cheap hosting is also the most common reason a site feels slow.
- SSL certificate. Should be included. If someone is charging you separately for basic SSL, that is worth questioning.
- Maintenance. Updates, backups, security patches, small content changes. On WordPress this is not optional — an unmaintained site is the one that gets defaced.
Our own maintenance and hosting runs from R250 to R750 a month depending on the package, and it is printed on the pricing page rather than discovered later.
Where quotes go wrong
Page count as the unit of pricing. It sounds fair and it measures the wrong thing. Ask what each page has to do.
"SEO" as a line item with no definition. Basic on-page work — structure, titles, descriptions, speed, a sitemap — should be part of any competent build. Ongoing content and link work is a separate, ongoing service. If a quote says "SEO: R3 000" and nothing else, find out which one you are buying.
No mention of who owns what. You should own the domain, the hosting account and the content. Get that in writing before you pay a deposit.
A number with no scope attached. If the quote does not say how many revisions, what happens when you want a change, and what is excluded, the number is not really a number.
Five questions to ask any developer
- What is the total once-off, and what is the total monthly?
- Whose name is the domain registered in?
- Can I edit my own text and images afterwards, without calling you?
- What is not included in this price?
- What happens in six months if I want to add a page?
Any developer worth hiring will answer all five without hesitating. If the answers get vague, that is your answer.
What we charge
We publish fixed prices for the three builds we get asked for most, in rands and dollars, with the monthly cost listed next to each one. Custom-coded builds and business systems are quoted per project, because pretending otherwise would just mean padding the number.