Why does the same website cost anywhere from NT$9,000 to NT$300,000?

You email the same brief to three companies. The numbers come back at NT$9,000, NT$80,000, and NT$300,000.

Your first reaction is usually "someone's ripping me off." Most of the time, no one is. All three heard you say "I want a company website" and pictured something completely different — and there's no way to spot the difference on the quote, because they all use the same words.

This piece breaks the cost apart. You won't come out an expert, but you will know which kind you're buying, and what the other party is actually doing when they quote that price.

Let's start with the most counterintuitive part: page count barely affects price

Most people assume websites are sold by the page. Five pages costs more than three; twenty costs more still.

That's not how it works. Once the first page is done, pages two through ten are usually the same layout with different content — the added cost is small. What actually pushes a price into the next bracket iswhether the site has "moving parts"— that is, whether users can do anything to it, and whether it has to remember anything.

On a company profile site, users can only look. Once it's built, it looks the same every day.

On a site with a booking system, users pick a time slot, submit, and get a confirmation email; you need to see it in the back end, edit it, and stop two people from grabbing the same slot. Every one of those things has to be written, tested, and thought through for "what if someone enters nonsense?"

Same five pages — but more than 10x the work. This is the single biggest source of quote variation.

Broken down, here's what you're paying for

1. Design

Two approaches, with very different costs.

One is templating: buy an off-the-shelf template and drop in your colours, fonts, photos, and copy. Fast, cheap, reliable — the downside is the layout won't fit your content perfectly, and other companies out there look a lot like you.

The other is laying it out around your content. Your product has seven specs to compare side by side; your service process has five stages to draw as a single line — there's no ready-made template for that, so someone has to sit down and design the layout.

Templating runs from a few thousand to NT$10,000–20,000. Custom design starts in the tens of thousands.This is the second-biggest source of price variation.

2. Front-end build

Turning the design files into a real page that looks good on phone, tablet, and desktop. The workload here tracks the complexity of the design directly — the freer the design, the longer the build.

3. Back end and data

Everything called "moving parts" above lives here: forms, accounts, bookings, carts, admin interfaces. Without those requirements this line is zero; with them, it usually costs more than the first two combined.

4. Content

Who writes the copy, who shoots the photos. This is the item that most often disappears from a quote and then becomes a problem mid-project — because most quotes assume "the client will provide it," and most clients assume it's included.

A beautifully built site stuffed with placeholder text delivers nothing on launch day.Nailing this down before you sign matters more than comparing prices.

5. Launch and beyond

Domain registration, hosting, certificates (the padlock in front of your URL that stops browsers from warning visitors), backups, and who to call when you need to change a phone number later.

The amounts here are small, but this is the only item thatcomes back every year.

So what are those three numbers, exactly?

Around NT$10,000: templated, presentation-only, not many pages. This fits when you need a site that's findable, looks legitimate, and can go on a business card, with content that rarely changes. It isn't a budget version of the NT$300,000 site — it's a different thing.

NT$50,000 to NT$200,000: design built around your content, possibly with simple functionality (contact form, news updates, multiple languages). Most SME websites land here.

NT$300,000 and up: there's a real system behind it. Accounts, payments, bookings, inventory, admin back end. At this point you're not buying a "website" — you're buying software that happens to live in a browser.

If your needs are the first kind but you receive a quote for the third, you're usually not being ripped off — the other party assumed you wanted the full package. It works the other way too: ask for a booking system on a NT$10,000 budget and you'll usually end up with something you wouldn't dare put in front of customers.

Three questions to ask before you sign

"Who owns the domain and the source code?"

This is the most important one. With some platforms and companies, the site is built inside their system — you pay, the content is yours, but you can't take it with you. The day you want to switch providers, you're starting over.

The normal answer is: the domain is registered in your name, and you get the source code. You can take it elsewhere any time.

"After launch, what does changing one line of text cost?"

Some quotes are cheap up front and expensive later. In the first year after launch you'll want to change something at least ten times — a phone number, a photo, one more news post. Whether that's covered by a maintenance fee, billed per request, or quoted as a project every time should be settled in advance.

"Does this price include content?"

Same as above — copy and photos. Ask.

Our own numbers, and why they look like this

We publish our prices openly on the services page: single-page presentation sites from NT$9,000, multi-page brand sites from NT$18,000, and functional sites with forms and an admin back end from NT$35,000.

That's lower than most of the industry, for three specific reasons — none of which is doing less:

1. We build static sites. In plain terms: the pages are generated before delivery, so when a visitor arrives the files are served directly with no computation on the spot. Dropping an entire layer of database and server management makes it fast to load, near-impossible to hack, and close to zero in hosting costs — and all of that saving shows up in the price. The trade-off is that it doesn't suit things like membership systems, so when you genuinely need one we'll say so plainly: that's a different bracket.

2. A one-person company, no middle layer. The person you talk to is the person doing the work. Nothing gets lost passing from sales to PM, PM to designer, designer to engineer.

3. We run our own products too. A tarot LINE bot, an e-bike rental system, a restaurant-picking bot — all shipped and maintained by us. The pitfalls you only discover after launch, we've already hit on our own products first.

The domain and the source code are yours. It's written into the contract.

To work out which bracket you fall into, theservices pagehas full details on all three tiers — or just email us: [email protected]. Explain what you need and we'll tell you what it should cost, including answers like "you don't actually need it to be that complicated."