the three price points
fifteen to forty thousand buys a template site — wordpress or a drag-and-drop builder, three to five pages, a contact form, your photos and copy dropped into a theme someone else designed. it works. it will look like the other template sites in your category because it is built the same way. setup takes one to two weeks. the freelancer moves on.
eighty thousand to one lakh fifty thousand buys a custom-designed site — a layout built for your brand, your typography, your content structure. no template compromise. the pages load faster, the design is yours, and the code can be extended. a guwahati café that wants to stand out on search or a fitness studio that needs a booking widget on the homepage belongs in this tier.
two lakh fifty thousand and above is a system that does something. a tea brand that needs d2c ordering and a subscription engine. a tour operator with live availability and a booking confirmation flow. a clinic that needs appointment scheduling, patient records, and whatsapp follow-ups. the price is not for the design — it is for the backend the design sits on top of.
what the price does and does not buy
every tier gets you pages that exist on the internet. only the higher tiers get you something with longevity. a template site is hard to change when your brand evolves because the structure belongs to the theme author. a custom build is harder to extend when you need a booking module two years later if the codebase was not designed for it. a system build includes the architecture decision document so the next developer knows where to add the next feature.
the cheapest site is not always the wrong choice. a handloom shop in sualkuchi with three products and a whatsapp link needs a clean four-page site, not a bespoke system. the expensive option is only right when the site has work to do — transactions, appointments, reservations, registrations.
the costs nobody quotes
every site quote covers the build. few quotes cover the rest.
hosting: ₹3,000–8,000 a month, depending on whether you are on shared hosting, a managed wordpress host, or a cloud server. the cheap hosting options sometimes mean your site is slow during traffic spikes or goes down under real load. a tea brand that sends an email campaign and the site falls over has a hosting problem, not a design problem.
maintenance: framework updates, security patches, performance monitoring. on a template site this is maybe one to two hours a month. on a custom build it depends on how the original developer left things.
content: every quote assumes you will supply the photographs, the copy, the product descriptions. most businesses budget zero for this and then wonder why the site looks empty six weeks in.
how to decide
one question gives you the tier. what does this site need to do?
if the answer is 'look professional and have our contact details', tier one. if the answer is 'rank on google for our location and convert visitors into enquiries', tier two. if the answer is 'take bookings, process payments, and send confirmation messages automatically', tier three.
the cost difference between tier one and tier three is real. the cost of building tier one when you need tier three — and rebuilding a year later — is larger.