Nobody publishes real website prices, which is why every business owner in Pakistan gets four quotes that range from 15,000 to 400,000 rupees for what sounds like the same thing. The spread is not random - it reflects genuinely different products. Here is what each tier actually contains.
Tier 1: Single-page site — Rs 25,000 to 60,000
One long scrolling page: hero, services, testimonials, contact form. Right for a personal brand, a consultant, or validating a business idea before investing more.
What you should get at this price:
- Responsive design that genuinely works on phones, not just shrinks
- A working contact form that emails you
- Basic on-page SEO: title, meta description, headings, alt text
- Deployment plus a domain connected
- One or two revision rounds
What you should not expect: a content management system, blog, or the ability to edit it yourself.
Tier 2: Multi-page business site — Rs 60,000 to 150,000
Five to ten pages: home, about, services, portfolio, blog, contact. This is the right tier for most established local businesses.
- Content management so you can edit text and add blog posts yourself
- A blog system, which matters more for SEO than the design does
- Proper technical SEO: sitemap, robots.txt, structured data, canonical tags
- Google Analytics and Search Console connected
- Performance work so it loads in under three seconds on mobile data
The blog is the part people cut to save money and then regret. Organic traffic comes from content, not from a nicer hero section.
Tier 3: E-commerce store — Rs 150,000 to 500,000
The range is wide because "online store" covers everything from a fifty-product Shopify setup to a custom marketplace.
Shopify or WooCommerce — Rs 150,000 to 250,000
Faster to launch, lower risk, ongoing platform fees. Right for most retail businesses. You are paying for setup, theme customisation, product import, payment and shipping integration.
Custom build — Rs 300,000 to 500,000+
Worth it only when you have requirements a platform genuinely cannot handle: unusual pricing logic, multi-vendor, deep ERP integration, or very high volume where platform fees exceed development cost.
Most businesses asking for a custom store should start on Shopify. I say this as someone who builds custom stores.
Tier 4: Custom web application — Rs 400,000 and up
Booking systems, dashboards, SaaS products, internal tools. Priced by scope, not by page count, because the work is in the logic rather than the layout.
Cost drivers here:
- User accounts, roles and permissions
- Payment processing and subscription handling
- Third-party integrations, each of which is its own small project
- Admin panel, which is usually as much work as the user-facing app
- Real-time features like chat or live tracking
What actually changes the price
Two quotes for the same brief differ mostly on these:
- Who writes the content. If the developer writes and sources images, add 30 to 50 percent.
- Custom design versus template. A Figma design from scratch adds meaningful cost and is often worth it.
- Integrations. Each payment gateway, CRM or shipping API is days of work, not hours.
- Revision rounds. Unlimited revisions is not generosity, it is a pricing trap for both sides.
- Post-launch support. Three months of bug fixes should be included; new features should not be.
Recurring costs people forget
- Domain: Rs 3,000 to 5,000 per year
- Hosting: free on Vercel or Netlify for most sites; Rs 8,000 to 30,000 per year for traditional hosting
- SSL certificate: free with modern hosts, do not pay for this
- Shopify subscription: roughly Rs 10,000 per month at the basic tier
- Maintenance: Rs 10,000 to 40,000 per month if you want someone on call
Quotes you should walk away from
Red flags, in rough order of how much they will cost you later:
- A price given before anyone asked what your business does
- "Unlimited pages and unlimited revisions" - nobody can deliver that profitably, so quality gets cut instead
- No written scope document
- Refusal to hand over hosting, domain or source code access
- A portfolio of sites that are all the same template
- Anything under Rs 15,000 for a real business site - the maths does not work, so something is being skipped
How to get an accurate quote
Send this and you will get comparable numbers back instead of guesses:
- What your business does, in two sentences
- What you want a visitor to do on the site
- Roughly how many pages, and whether you need a blog
- Two or three sites you like and why
- Whether you have logo, brand colours, text and photos ready
- Your budget range and deadline
Telling a developer your budget is not weakness. It lets them tell you honestly what is achievable inside it instead of quoting a number designed to win the job and then cutting corners.
Frequently asked questions
Why is a Pakistani developer cheaper than an agency abroad?
Cost of living, not skill. The same work billed at 60 US dollars an hour in London is billed at a fraction of that here. This is why Pakistani freelancers compete well internationally.
Should I use Wix or Squarespace instead?
For a very simple brochure site with no growth plans, yes - it is cheaper. The trade-off is limited SEO control, monthly fees forever, and no export path when you outgrow it.
How long does a business website take?
Two to four weeks if content is ready. Content is almost never ready, which is why projects take six to eight weeks in practice.
Do I own the code?
You should, and it should say so in writing. Get repository access and hosting account ownership at handover, not "later".