What does building a website or app cost? An honest overview for SMBs

It is the first question every business owner asks: what does it cost, a website, platform or app like that. And rightly so. It is also the question most agencies tiptoe around. Here is the straight answer: it depends on a few things you can see for yourself, and once you understand those, you also understand why prices are so far apart.

Where the price actually comes from

A website or app has only a few real cost lines. Design, development, the backend and APIs running behind it, and the content that goes in. And on top of that, the time it takes to get to the finished product.

At Baboons it looks like this: we try to map out the average lead time of the whole process, and alongside that we look at how many man-hours we need to reach that end result. In the end the sum is simple: how many developers it takes and how many hours they are at work.

A simple company site with a few pages and some photos is a completely different animal from a platform where users log in, pay and exchange data. Both can be called "a website". The difference is in the scope, and that scope can quietly run away with you.

Why the range is so wide

Two projects that look alike can easily be three times apart in price. That is rarely because of the agency, and almost always because of what is in the scope.

A few things that really shift it:

• Custom versus standard. Adapting an existing component costs a fraction of inventing something new.
• Integrations. Hooking up your accounting, CRM, or an external API is where the work suddenly multiplies.
• Who provides the content. A site with ready text and photos runs differently than a site where the text still has to be written along the way.
• What happens after launch. A product keeps moving, and the upkeep afterwards is a real cost line.

What an honest quote looks like

Ask a few agencies to describe the same thing and you get four different quotes. Not because they are being sneaky, but because they read the scope differently.

A few things we would ask about:

• What the goal of your website or app is, and what you would like a potential customer to do on your site.
• From there we want to know in how many steps they have to reach a certain point, and we look at which pages or screens need to be built.
• We look at the existing systems you already work with and whether they are easy to integrate, or whether we would recommend a different system for you.
• And we also look at competitors that already have a similar system in place.

What matters to us is that we look at the minimum needed to reach the point where your app, website or product adds real value. The feedback we like to see here comes from your customers themselves, so we get a clear picture of how effective your offer really is.

Want a fair estimate for your situation? See how we work on websites and mobile apps, or book a call. Then we will figure it out together.