The word "website" hides four different products
A five-page brochure site and a thirteen-store retail platform are both "websites" in the way that a bicycle and a lorry are both "vehicles". Until a quote tells you which one it is pricing, the number is meaningless.
In practice most commissions fall into one of four tiers. A static brand site is presentation only — no database, no logins, content changes go through a developer. A CMS-driven site adds an admin panel so your team edits content without touching code. A commerce or catalogue platform adds products, search, and either a checkout or a structured enquiry flow. An operational system adds the back office: orders, inventory, roles, reporting.
Each tier is roughly an order of magnitude more work than the one before it. That is where the 10× spread in quotes comes from.
What actually drives the number
Three things move price far more than anything else, and none of them is the page count.
- Whether anything is dynamic. The moment content is editable, or users log in, or data is stored, you have a database, an admin interface, permissions and a security surface. This is the single biggest jump in cost.
- How much of the design is genuinely custom. A purchased theme with your logo is cheap because someone else already did the design work. Custom means wireframes, hi-fidelity screens and a design system — real hours before a line of production code.
- Integrations. Payment gateways, GST-compliant invoicing, channel managers, CRMs, ERPs. Each one is a separate contract with someone else's API and someone else's failure modes.
What does not drive it as much as you think
Page count barely matters once a design system exists — the twentieth page costs a fraction of the first. Neither does hosting, which is a rounding error for most business sites. And "number of revisions" is a red flag rather than a feature: a process that locks the design early needs fewer revisions than one that discovers problems in week nine.
How to read a quote
A quote worth taking seriously will tell you which tier it is pricing, what happens when you want to change something after launch, and who owns the code. Vagueness on any of those three is the warning sign — not the price itself.
Be especially careful with quotes that are dramatically below the others. The usual explanations are a template you could have bought yourself, or a scope that excludes the parts that turn out to matter. Neither is a bargain.
How Qyverix scopes it
We do not publish a price list, because a number without a scope misleads. What we do instead: a free thirty-minute discovery call, then a fixed quote before any work starts. Static brand sites ship in 3–5 days, CMS-driven builds in 2–4 weeks, and larger commerce or management platforms are scoped at 6–10 weeks.
If the honest answer is that you need less than you were planning to buy, we will say so on the call. That conversation is cheaper for everyone than discovering it in month two.