How Much Does Website Development Cost in India? Complete Pricing Guide (2026)

Someone calls and asks what a website costs. It's a reasonable question, and it's also close to unanswerable — a bit like asking what a vehicle costs. A scooter and a delivery truck are both vehicles. Both take you places. One costs ₹80,000 and one costs ₹18 lakh, and neither is overpriced.

So instead of one number, here is the whole picture: what things actually cost in India in 2026, what makes the number move, and what nobody puts in the quote.

We build these for a living, in Bardoli and Surat, mostly for businesses doing between ₹50 lakh and ₹20 crore a year. The figures below are what we see in the market — including from competitors whose quotes our clients forward to us.

The price ranges#

Two notes before you use this table.

These are 2026 prices for competent work. There is a market below ₹8,000 and people are buying in it. What they receive is a purchased template with their logo dropped in, no strategy, no content, and no one answering the phone in month two. Sometimes that is genuinely enough. Just know what you're buying.

And the ranges overlap because scope overlaps. A ₹1,20,000 business website and a ₹1,50,000 custom one differ less in pages than in whether anyone thought hard about what those pages should say.

What actually moves the price#

Clients often assume page count is the main driver. It isn't, or at least not the way they think. Ten pages that reuse four layouts cost barely more than six. The real variables:

Design origin. Adapting an existing theme takes days. Designing screens from scratch — wireframes, revisions, a design system — takes weeks. This is usually the single largest line item, and it's where cheap quotes cut first.

Content. Who writes the words? If the answer is "we'll send you our brochure," the actual answer is "nobody," and the project stalls for six weeks. Professional copy runs ₹1,500–₹4,000 per page. It is the highest-leverage money in the entire budget and the first thing people cut.

Integrations. Payment gateway, CRM, Tally, WhatsApp Business API, a booking calendar, an inventory system. Each one is real engineering: authentication, error states, what happens when the API is down at 11pm. Budget ₹15,000–₹50,000 per meaningful integration. A "simple Tally sync" has never once been simple.

Content management. Do you need to edit pages yourself? A CMS adds ₹20,000–₹60,000. Worth it if you publish weekly. Not worth it if you'll touch the site twice a year — which, honestly, is most businesses.

Technical SEO. Structured data, meta handling, sitemaps, page-speed work, Core Web Vitals. Add ₹15,000–₹40,000. Skipping it doesn't fail the launch. It quietly fails the next two years.

Revisions. Read the contract. "Unlimited revisions" is either a lie or already priced in at a level you'd notice. Two or three rounds is normal and honest.

Your timeline. A four-week deadline on eight weeks of work costs 30–50% more, because someone works weekends. This is fair. Pay it or move the date.

The costs nobody puts in the quote#

This is where budgets break. Not the development — the everything else.

• Domain: ₹800 – ₹1,500 per year. Fine.
• Hosting: ₹3,000 – ₹15,000 a year for a business site. Static sites on Vercel or Netlify can be free. Do not buy a ₹299/month shared plan and then wonder why the site is slow.
• SSL: free via Let's Encrypt. Anyone charging you ₹5,000 for "SSL security" is charging you for nothing.
• Business email: ₹1,500 – ₹2,500 per user per year. You need this. yourbusiness@gmail.com on a printed visiting card is a real cost you can't see.
• Content writing: ₹10,000 – ₹50,000 if you're not writing it yourself.
• Photography: ₹15,000 – ₹60,000. For ecommerce and restaurants, the highest-return money you will spend. Stock photos of other people's offices convince nobody.
• Plugin and theme licences: ₹5,000 – ₹25,000 a year on WordPress. Recurring, and easy to forget until renewal.
• Payment gateway: setup is usually free; expect ~2% per transaction, forever.
• Maintenance: ₹3,000 – ₹15,000 a month. Updates, backups, security patches, small fixes. Skip it and you'll pay more later, in a worse mood.
• GST: 18%. Check whether the quote includes it. Half don't.

Budget 20–30% above the development quote for year one. This isn't pessimism. It's the difference between a website and a website that works.

Custom vs WordPress#

WordPress runs a large share of the web for good reasons. It is cheap to start, easy to hire for, and has a plugin for almost everything.

A WordPress business site: ₹40,000 – ₹1,20,000. A comparable custom build: ₹1,50,000 – ₹3,00,000. On day one the gap is obvious and WordPress wins.

Then time passes. Plugin licences renew. A core update breaks the page builder. A vulnerability in a plugin you forgot you installed needs patching within days. Performance sags as plugin count grows — we regularly audit WordPress sites scoring below 40 on mobile, carrying twenty-three plugins, of which the owner recognises four.

Over five years the total cost converges more than people expect. Not always in custom's favour, but far closer than the initial quotes suggest.

Choose WordPress when content is the point — you publish regularly, need non-technical editing, want a large hiring pool, and your requirements are conventional.

Choose custom when you have logic a plugin can't express, performance is a competitive advantage, you're integrating with internal systems, or you've already installed fifteen plugins to approximate something a developer could have built properly in a week.

The tell is simple. If your team says "there's a plugin for that" more than twice in a planning meeting, you're describing a custom application and paying for it in plugin licences and fragility.

Custom vs Shopify#

For ecommerce specifically, the comparison changes shape, because Shopify's cost is a percentage, not a fee.

A Shopify store costs ₹60,000 – ₹1,20,000 to set up. Then: the plan (₹2,900 – ₹32,000 a month), apps (₹3,000 – ₹12,000 a month, and it's always more apps than you planned), and — since Shopify Payments isn't available in India — a 0.5% to 2% cut of your turnover on top of your payment gateway's fee.

That last one is the part people miss. It's charged on revenue, not profit. At ₹1 crore of online sales on the Basic plan, that's ₹2 lakh a year going to Shopify purely for the privilege of using Razorpay.

A custom ecommerce build costs ₹1,50,000 – ₹4,00,000 once. Hosting is ~₹2,000 a month. Nobody takes a percentage.

Below roughly ₹40 lakh of annual online revenue, Shopify is cheaper and better, and it isn't close — you should be spending on photography and ads, not on developers. Above ₹50–60 lakh, the percentage starts to look like a salary you're paying to nobody.

We wrote about this trade-off in detail in Custom Website vs Shopify, including the point where migrating makes sense.

What a business website should actually cost you#

Most businesses reading this need a business website, not a platform. Five to eight pages. Home, services, about, work, contact, maybe a blog.

At ₹40,000 – ₹70,000 you should get: a professionally adapted design, mobile-first build, fast load times, contact forms that actually deliver, basic SEO setup, Google Business Profile connection, and a month of support. This is the right budget for most local businesses and it is not a compromise.

At ₹80,000 – ₹1,50,000 you should additionally get: original design rather than adaptation, written content, structured data, real page-speed work, analytics configured properly, and three months of support.

Above ₹1,50,000 you're paying for strategy — someone questioning whether the pages you asked for are the pages you need. Worth it if you're competing on search or selling something considered. Not worth it for a workshop that needs a phone number and directions.

If a quote in the ₹1 lakh range doesn't mention content or SEO anywhere, you are being sold a design file, not a website.

What an ecommerce website should cost#

₹60,000 – ₹1,50,000 on Shopify or WooCommerce: theme setup, up to 50 products loaded, payment gateway, shipping rules, basic SEO. Fine for most catalogues.

₹1,50,000 – ₹4,00,000 custom: your own product logic, custom checkout, admin panel, ERP or inventory integration, page-speed engineering. Justified when your product doesn't fit a variant dropdown, or when platform fees have become a line item you can feel.

Two things nobody tells you. Product photography usually costs more than the store. And loading 200 products properly — descriptions, images, variants, SEO fields — is 20 to 40 hours of work that has to be done by someone, and it will be you if it isn't in the contract.

Timelines#

Development is almost never the bottleneck. Content is. The single best thing you can do to finish on time and on budget is have your text, logo files and photographs ready on day one. Projects that do this finish roughly a third faster, and we've never seen an exception.

How to read a quote#

A few things worth checking, learned from cleaning up other people's projects.

Ask who owns the code. Some agencies retain it, which means you cannot leave. Get ownership in writing.

Ask what happens in month three. If the answer is vague, budget for a rescue.

Ask for the maintenance cost upfront. Not knowing it isn't a saving; it's a deferred invoice.

Be suspicious of "unlimited revisions." Nobody works for free. It's either priced in, or it's a promise that dies at revision four.

Be more suspicious of the cheapest quote. We have rebuilt enough ₹15,000 websites at ₹80,000 to say this plainly: the cheap site is often the expensive one, paid in two instalments eighteen months apart.

Ask to see three sites they built that are still live. Not designs. Live URLs. Then open them on your phone, on mobile data, and count the seconds.

So what should you actually budget?#

If you run a local business and need to be found, taken seriously, and contacted: ₹50,000 – ₹90,000, plus about ₹15,000 for the first year of hosting, email and maintenance. That's a real website, built properly, that will serve you for four or five years.

If you're selling online under ₹40 lakh a year: ₹80,000 – ₹1,50,000 on Shopify, and spend whatever's left on photography and ads.

If you're above that, or your product has logic a template can't hold: ₹1,50,000 – ₹4,00,000 custom, with a maintenance retainer you actually pay.

And if the entire budget is ₹15,000 — buy a domain, set up a Google Business Profile properly, and wait. A bad website is worse than no website, because it tells the truth about how much you cared.