I get the same message every week. "How much does a website cost?" There is no honest single answer, and any agency that gives you one before seeing your content structure is selling you something.
What I can give you is the shape of the German market in 2026, the line items that quietly inflate a quote, and the questions that make a bad quote obvious in ten minutes.
The four price bands you will actually be quoted
Under EUR 1,000. A template on page-builder hosting. Someone drags sections, you get a domain and a form that emails them. Fine for a one-person business that needs a phone number on Google. It is not fine if you need GDPR-safe tracking, or if the person who built it disappears.
EUR 1,500 to EUR 5,000. This is where a small business with real intent should be playing. Custom design or a heavily modified system, 5-10 pages, mobile-first, contact form with proper data handling, basic on-page SEO, hosting setup, and someone who answers the phone when it breaks.
EUR 5,000 to EUR 15,000. Custom builds with integrations: booking, a member area, shop catalogue, CRM hooks, multilingual content. You are paying for engineering decisions, not pixels.
EUR 15,000 and up. Anything with compliance review, migration from a legacy system, or a design system your team extends themselves.
If someone quotes EUR 800 for the third band, they have not understood your requirements. If someone quotes EUR 12,000 for the second, ask what specifically justifies it.
Hourly quotes are where the money leaks
A fixed-price quote tells you the ceiling before you sign. An hourly quote tells you nothing except that you own the risk.
Here is what an hourly engagement in Germany typically bills that a fixed-price build already includes:
- Requirement calls and revision rounds. Three rounds becomes nine, and every one is billable.
- Content entry. Your text going into the CMS is a separate line item.
- Image sourcing and licensing.
- Basic SEO setup as an add-on at EUR 80-150 per hour.
- Deployment, staging environments, and DNS changes.
- Bug fixes in the first three months, because "that was not in scope."
A EUR 65/hour quote that runs 90 hours costs EUR 5,850. A EUR 3,500 fixed-price build with those items included is cheaper and more predictable, even though the headline number looked worse on day one.
The five questions that expose a bad quote
Ask these on the first call. The answers tell you everything.
- "What happens to my site if you stop answering emails?" You want to hear: you own the hosting account, the domain, and the repository, and there is an export path. Anything else is a hostage situation.
- "Is the design yours or a template, and can I see three sites you shipped recently?" Ask for live URLs, not mockups. If the URLs are older than two years, the work is not current.
- "Which line items are outside the fixed price?" Force the list in writing before signing. Revisions beyond scope and content entry are the usual suspects.
- "Who owns the CMS credentials and the Google Search Console property?" If the answer is "we do, for your safety", that agency is keeping your search data from you.
- "What does month seven look like?" A site is not a one-time purchase. Someone should be able to describe maintenance, uptime and speed in concrete terms.
What I wish more businesses checked before hiring anyone
Look at the site on a real phone, not a browser preview. Then run it through PageSpeed Insights and read the "Opportunities" tab, not just the score. A slow site costs you conversions on every channel, including the paid ones you are already funding.
Then check the legal layer, because German enforcement is not theoretical. Impressum reachable from every page, cookie consent that actually blocks scripts before consent, a privacy policy that names every processor you send data to, and an AV-Vertrag for any tool that touches personal data. If your builder treats these as optional add-ons, they will build you a fine-looking site that becomes a liability.
A practical way to budget
Pick the band you are in, then hold back 15-20 percent for the first year of hosting, maintenance, and the two content changes you will definitely want after launch. A EUR 3,000 build plus EUR 600 of first-year running cost is a EUR 3,600 decision. Budgeting for EUR 3,000 total and being surprised in month four is how good projects turn hostile.
If you want an actual number for your situation, send me your current site and the three things you need it to do. I will tell you which band you are in and what I would not pay for.
