Website price list: what each type of site costs

A website for a small business in Montenegro or Serbia costs from a few hundred euros for a template to 3,000 euros and more once it becomes a web app. With Rhomn, a one-page site, a company site and a booking or enquiry site each start at 900 euros, a web shop with card payments at 1,500 and a web app at 3,000. Scope, price and payment terms are agreed in writing before work starts.

A single price for a website hides the useful question, which is what kind of site you need. This price list puts five types side by side: what each one is for, what it includes, where it starts with us and what pushes it higher. We are a studio in Budva working with businesses in Montenegro, Serbia and abroad, and these are the web design prices we quote. For the reasoning behind the numbers, read what a website build costs and what drives the price and what a website costs to build in Montenegro.

Website price list by type of site

Each figure is the starting price for that type of site. The written scope fixes the final one, and every row ends the same way: the files, repositories and accounts belong to you.

Booking site or web shop: where the price jumps

The jump from 900 to 1,500 euros comes mostly from whether customers pay on the site. Taking payment means checkout, refunds and failed charges, and each of those is a step where a tourist comparing two operators on a phone can stop. Quadomania, a quad-tour operator in Žabljak, avoids all of it: the site carries the tour, date and rider count into a WhatsApp or Viber message, and the conversation continues there. That keeps a site like this in the booking row rather than the shop row.

When a business does need cards on the site, the setup here is its own piece of work. Stripe’s list of supported countries includes Croatia and Slovenia but not Montenegro or Serbia, so a business registered here takes cards through a bank’s e-commerce service or another provider. The other route is to open a US LLC with Stripe, which we set up for 1,500 euros. Banks set their own conditions. CKB’s eCommerce service, for example, asks for an account held with the bank for at least a year, at least 100,000 euros a year in payments through it, and a server in Montenegro for the connection. The customer types the card details on a page the bank hosts, so the shop has to hand the order over and read the result when the customer comes back. Check which bank or provider will accept you before anyone draws a design.

A web shop in Serbia also has to issue receipts. The Tax Administration has stated that online retail is not exempt from e-fiscalization: the seller issues a fiscal receipt and sends it to the buyer with the goods. If your orders still arrive as Instagram messages, a web shop or selling through Instagram covers the middle path, a catalogue that hands the order to WhatsApp or Viber.

Content and data: what moves a site within its row

Inside a row, the price moves with how much text has to be written and how much data has to stay current. A first-time customer has questions a template never answers. For Quadomania: what gear is provided, whether a licence is needed, what happens when the weather turns on the Durmitor plateau. Writing and structuring those answers took longer than the booking form did, and the site runs in two languages, so every answer exists twice.

iLokal is a map with real places and filters that hold, so every listing has to stay accurate long after launch. Quadomania’s five routes are fixed and need none of that upkeep. Once a site holds data that changes and people log in to change it, it has moved to the last row: user accounts, logins and a database make it a product build from 3,000 euros. What a mobile app costs to build in Montenegro covers what raises that number.

Cheap template sites, and when they are fine

A site for a few hundred euros is usually a ready-made theme with your logo, photos and text dropped in. That is an honest product, and for plenty of small businesses it is the right one: a handful of pages with opening hours, a map and a phone number, with nothing to book and nothing to keep current.

It falls short when the site has to do something. A theme is built to suit many businesses, so it tends to carry more code than any one of them uses, and a phone on a mobile connection feels that first. That matters for search, because Google uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. The other thing to check is ownership: at the cheap end, the domain and hosting are sometimes registered to whoever built the site. Custom website vs template goes through what the difference buys.

What a written quote must state

Two quotes can only be compared if they say the same things. Ask for these in writing before you pay anything:

• Scope. Which pages, which languages, which features, who writes the text and what is left out. Anything not in the scope is not in the price.
• Price. One figure for that scope, and how changes after sign-off are priced.
• Payment terms. How much is paid, and when.
• The domain in your name. It is the address your customers know. If someone else holds it, your site depends on them.
• The code and the accounts. The repository handed over, and hosting, analytics, Google Search Console and any payment provider registered to you. The studio can be a user on those accounts, not the owner.

With us, scope, price and payment terms are agreed in writing before work starts, and the files, repositories and accounts belong to you at the end. How to choose a web design agency has the full checklist.

Questions owners ask