"How much should a website cost?" is one of the first questions people ask us, and the honest answer has always been "it depends". That is true, but it is not very useful when you are trying to decide whether an idea is worth pursuing. So on the Internetivo homepage there is a short planner: four questions, no sign-up, and at the end you see a price range, a timeline, the team you would need and how the work would be split into milestones.
This article opens the planner up and explains what it does with your answers, so you can use the result well and know where its limits are.
Four questions, one plan
The planner asks, one at a time:
- What do you need? A website, an online shop, a mobile app, a brand identity, a security check, or marketing.
- How much do you need? Just the basics, the full thing, or something big. The wording adapts to what you picked: for a website, "the full thing" means a few pages, about five to ten; for a shop, it means up to 200 products with delivery and payments.
- Who should build it? Rising talent, an experienced pro, or a senior expert.
- When do you need it? No rush, normal pace, or urgent.
Your plan updates as you choose, so you can go back and change an answer and see straight away what it does to the price and the timeline.
How the range is worked out
Every combination of "what" and "how much" starts from a typical price range for an experienced professional working at a normal pace. Those ranges are our own estimates of what that kind of work typically costs. They are not a formula that pretends to know your project in detail.
Take a website for a small business with five to ten pages. With an experienced pro at a normal pace, the planner shows a range of about €1,000 to €2,500, a timeline of around three weeks, and a team of two: a web designer and a web developer.
Then your other two answers adjust the range:
- Who builds it. Rising talent brings the price down to roughly half to 60% of the experienced-pro range. A senior expert raises it to roughly 1.6 to 2.2 times. The range widens at the senior end because senior work varies more: you are often paying for judgement on harder problems as well as hours.
- When you need it. "No rush" saves about 10% but gives the work around 30% more time. "Urgent" costs about 30% more and compresses the timeline to roughly 60% of normal. Rushing is never free: it means a professional rearranging other commitments for you.
The smallest figure shown on each option, the "From" price, is simply the lowest combination: the basics, built by rising talent, with no rush. For a website that currently starts from €200; for a mobile app, from €1,400.
Milestones in the plan
Alongside the total, the planner splits the work into three milestones, so you can see how you would pay for it in steps:
- Plan, about 30% of the budget,
- Build, about 50%,
- Launch, about 20%.
For marketing, which runs month by month, the steps are Strategy, Launch and Report.
This is how real projects on Internetivo run. Each milestone is delivered, you review it, and the professional is paid for it only after you approve it. Seeing the split at the planning stage helps you think about what "done" should look like at each step, which is the single most useful thing you can do before any project starts.
Using the estimate well
A planner result is a starting point for a conversation, not a quote. Here is how to get the most from it:
- Treat the range as a range. Where your project lands depends on details the planner cannot know: your content, your integrations, how many rounds of feedback you expect.
- If the number feels high, change the scope before you change the quality. Moving from "the full thing" to "just the basics" usually saves more than switching to a less experienced builder, and you can add features in a second phase.
- If you have flexibility on time, use it. "No rush" is the cheapest saving in the planner, and it often produces calmer, better work.
- Keep a buffer. Most projects change a little once they start. Setting aside a modest margin for revisions means a good idea mid-project does not become a budget problem.
What the planner does not do
To be clear about its limits: the planner gives an indicative range, not a price. The actual price comes from the professionals who reply to your task. When you post it, professionals send proposals with their own price, and you compare their profiles, rankings and Career Passports before you choose.
The planner also does not ask for your name or e-mail. Your plan is saved on your device so you can come back to it, and when you are ready, you can post it as a task. You pay the agreed price when you publish, Internetivo invoices you, and the professional is paid milestone by milestone as you approve the work.
If you have an idea you have been sitting on, it takes about thirty seconds to see what it might involve. That is often enough to turn "someday" into a plan.