What a website costs in 2026: 36 prices counted

In the Dutch market you pay 245 euros for “a website”. Or 26,795 euros. Both amounts are published openly on the site of a Dutch provider, and both are about a website.

That makes the question of what a website costs almost impossible to answer with one number. What is possible is finding out where that difference sits, and what each amount does and does not include.

So I made my own inventory. On 22 September 2026 I collected 36 publicly published prices from 18 Dutch and international providers: agencies, freelancers, subscription builders and shop platforms. I also looked up at the suppliers themselves what a domain name, hosting and a certificate really cost.

I name no agencies, no freelancers and no website builders. Only amounts, ranges and the method, so you can check the sums yourself. The suppliers of domain names, hosting and certificates I do name, because there you go to the price list yourself.

What I found: 36 prices, four categories

These are the ranges in the Dutch market. I have taken over every amount the way the provider publishes it, so without adding VAT to it or taking VAT off it. About half of the providers do not mention whether the amount excludes VAT, and at a 21 percent difference that is not a detail.

Category	Observations	One off	Added per month
Simple site, template or lightly adapted	10	245 to 1,295 euros	24.95 to 139 euros
Custom built site	12	745 to 26,795 euros	24.95 to 216.60 euros
Webshop	7	699 to 30,000 euros	69 to 101.65 euros
Builder or platform with a subscription	7	none	free to about 160 euros

Inside those ranges there is a clearer pattern than the extremes suggest.

For a simple site of a few pages you pay between 450 and 1,295 euros one off at almost every provider. The 245 euros at the bottom is a setup fee with a subscription of 49 euros per month and a twelve month contract. Add up that first year and you land on 833 euros, which puts you back in the middle of the group.

For a custom site for a small or medium sized business, say seven to fifteen pages with its own design, the core of the market sits between 1,750 and 6,100 euros. What is above that are web applications and large shops. What is below it is usually a template with a new colour.

The costs nobody puts on the first invoice

This is the part that surprises people, and it is easy to check because the suppliers publish their prices themselves.

What the first year costs you is not only the build price.

Domain name. SIDN, the foundation that manages the .nl domain, charges registrars about 4.38 euros per year excluding VAT. For consumers and businesses that works out at 16.50 to 26 euros per year. Watch out for the first year: I saw offers of 0.49 euros and even 0.10 euros for the first year. That says nothing about what you pay structurally. SIDN puts it this way: “Each registrar and reseller is free to decide what to charge their customers.”

Hosting. This is where the world views differ most. Three large platforms for static hosting have a free tier, and the first paid step sits at 5 to 20 dollars per month. Watch the terms of that free tier: at Vercel it is meant for personal, non commercial projects, so for a business site you will as a rule not get away with it. Dutch web hosting starts around 5.55 euros per month and runs up to about 30 euros. My own site runs on static hosting, and that is not a trick to look cheap: fewer moving parts also means less that can break.

Certificate. An SSL certificate is free in practice. Let’s Encrypt is a non profit and supplies certificates for nothing; in their own words a “free, automated, and open Certificate Authority”. Almost every host includes that automatically. If you buy one separately it costs 32.50 euros per year for a normal certificate and up to 200 euros for the heavier variants. If there is an amount for SSL on your invoice, ask why.

Maintenance. Seven providers with a public maintenance subscription show a range of 12.50 to 119 euros per month. The pattern in it is the most useful part. Up to about 35 euros you buy work a machine does: updates, backups and monitoring. From about 69 euros you also buy human time, usually thirty to sixty minutes per month, and mostly with hosting included. If a provider sits in between, ask which of the two you get, because that is exactly the difference that amount is about.

Where the difference in the build price sits

A website is largely hours times a rate. What providers publish themselves as an hourly rate for web design and development, I saw at 85 and 120 euros. The ranges that providers quote for that market run from 40 to 150 euros per hour, but those have no visible method, so I do not use them as a figure.

Work it back and a site of 1,750 euros at a rate of 100 euros per hour is exactly 17.5 hours of work. In those hours you can build a tidy site with an existing design as the basis, provided the texts and the photos are already there. What has to be right technically within those hours is in my article on technical SEO.

And that is exactly the difference most price comparisons miss. These are the four items that make amounts incomparable:

Texts. In my inventory I saw one package in which texts are explicitly included. With the rest there is nothing about it, or it says you supply them yourself. Texts for ten pages are ten to fifteen hours of work in no time. That is the biggest hidden difference between two proposals that look the same on paper.
Number of pages, and the price per extra page. Packages with “up to 5 pages” and “up to 15 pages” often differ by a factor of two in price. One provider publishes 50 euros per extra page; the rest do not.
Design rounds. I saw packages with two rounds, and packages with unlimited rounds. That difference is pure hours, and it is the most common reason a project runs over.
Migration. If you already have a site, something has to move across. With webshops migration is sometimes stated explicitly in the package, with normal sites almost never.

Does AI make it cheaper?

This is the question I searched for the most, and the answer is less exciting than you would hope.

I have not found a single primary source saying that websites have become cheaper because of AI. No study, no industry report, no statistic. What is there points the other way. Statistics Netherlands (CBS) keeps a price index for computer programming and consultancy. That index compares prices with 2021, which stands at 100. In the second quarter of 2026 it stood at 115.8, and that is 1.8 percent higher than a year earlier. That category is much broader than website building and the quarterly figure is provisional, but the direction is upward and not downward.

The AI builders themselves are not cheaper either than what was already there. Their subscriptions sit between about 10 and 50 dollars per month, and that is the same band as the classic website builders. What changes is what you pay for. No longer per page or per site, but per credit: a balance that gets used up by whatever you have the tool do.

What does change measurably is happening in the labour market. Two studies of freelance platforms looked at the period after generative AI arrived. The first, by Hui, Reshef and Zhou, found fewer assignments and lower earnings for freelancers in writing work and images. The second, by Demirci, Hannane and Zhu, found fewer job postings for work that is easy to automate, and alongside that found the assignments that remained were more complex and better paid.

That is something other than cheaper websites. It rather means that the simple part shifts to the tools and that you still need someone for the rest.

What an AI builder does and does not arrange for you, I worked out separately in my article on building a website with AI. The short version: the tools build fine, and the things that decide whether you get found are often left for you to check yourself.

Three questions that make every price comparable

If you have two or three proposals side by side, these three questions get you further than a spreadsheet.

How many hours are in this? Not to haggle, but because the amount only gets meaning once you can divide it by an hourly rate. Of the providers in my inventory, almost none publish hours. Ask for them.

What is not included? Ask specifically about texts, photos, the number of design rounds, migration of the old site, and the price of an extra page. Those are the four items on which projects run over.

What does this cost next year? So the domain name after the first year, hosting, maintenance and any licences. Add that up and you have the amount that leaves your account every twelve months, whether anything happens or not.

Also count in what comes on top after launch if you want to work on being found. What that costs in the Dutch market is in my article on outsourcing SEO.

I work with hours times a rate myself, and I state what falls outside it. On my page about web development I name no fixed amount, and that is a choice: I do not know what you need before we have talked about your site. What I do is show the build up, so you can see where the hours go.

In short

In my inventory of 36 public prices in the Dutch market on 22 September 2026, a simple site runs from 245 to 1,295 euros one off, a custom site from 745 to 26,795 euros, and a webshop from 699 to 30,000 euros.
The core of the Dutch small and medium sized business market for custom work sits between 1,750 and 6,100 euros.
A .nl domain costs SIDN about 4.38 euros per year at the wholesale rate; you pay 16.50 to 26 euros for it yourself. First year prices of ten cents mean nothing.
SSL is free in practice through Let’s Encrypt. A separate certificate costs 32.50 to 200 euros per year.
Maintenance runs from 12.50 to 119 euros per month. Below 35 euros you buy machine work, from 69 euros you buy human time.
There is no primary source saying that AI makes websites cheaper. The CBS figure for this services sector rose by 1.8 percent.
Always ask for hours, for what is not included, and for the costs of next year.

Frequently asked questions

What does a simple website cost in the Dutch market?

In my inventory of public prices on 22 September 2026 that sat between 245 and 1,295 euros one off, where the lowest amounts are a setup price with a subscription that has a contract term. For a few pages with an existing design, count on 450 to 1,295 euros, plus recurring costs.

What does a website cost per month in the Dutch market?

That depends on what you buy. Domain name 16.50 to 26 euros per year, hosting free to about 30 euros per month, maintenance 12.50 to 119 euros per month. A subscription builder combines that into one amount, from free to about 160 euros per month.

Is having a website built with AI cheaper?

The subscriptions of AI builders sit between about 10 and 50 dollars per month, the same band as normal website builders. I have not found a primary source saying that websites have become cheaper because of AI, and the CBS figure for this services sector actually rose.

Why do prices for the same thing differ so much?

Because “the same thing” is almost never the same. The four items that make the difference are texts, the number of pages, the number of design rounds and migration of your old site. Ask about those explicitly and the difference often becomes clear in one conversation.

Do I have to pay for SSL?

No, in most cases you do not. Let’s Encrypt supplies certificates free of charge and almost every host arranges that automatically. Buying a separate certificate is possible, but it rarely makes sense for a normal business site.

Sources

All figures consulted on 22 September 2026. The price inventory consists of 36 publicly published prices at 18 providers; I name no providers in this article.

Want to know what your site would cost?

You can request a quote with what you need, and you see straight away where the hours go. If you are still unsure whether your current site is the problem, start with a free GEO scan; you get the findings with the source alongside.