How Much Does a Business Website Cost in India in 2026?

A business website in India costs anywhere from a few thousand rupees a year on a DIY builder to ₹40,000–₹2,00,000 or more when an agency designs and builds it for you. The honest answer is that "a website" is like "a vehicle" — a scooter and a truck are both vehicles, and the price depends entirely on what you need it to do.

One thing to know upfront: there is no official rate card for websites in India. Except where we cite a published price, every figure below is a typical range and an estimate drawn from the Indian market — treat it as a starting point for conversations, not a quote.

The short answer

• DIY website builder — roughly ₹2,500–₹25,000 per year. Best for testing an idea or very tight budgets.
• Freelancer — roughly ₹10,000–₹75,000 one-time. Best for simple sites when you can manage the project yourself.
• Agency, brochure site — roughly ₹40,000–₹2,00,000 one-time. Best when you want strategy, design and content handled.
• Agency, e-commerce or custom — from about ₹1,00,000 into several lakh. Online stores, bookings, portals, anything custom.

For a published cross-check, Shopify's own cost guide puts custom-built sites at roughly USD 2,000 to USD 20,000 and up depending on complexity. In rupees that is very roughly ₹1.7–17 lakh, which is consistent with what the Indian agency market looks like at the upper end.

Route 1: DIY website builders

Builders such as Wix, Squarespace and Shopify let you assemble a site yourself from templates, on a monthly or yearly subscription. Published plan pricing changes often and varies by country, so check the current rupee pricing directly — Shopify publishes India pricing here — rather than trusting any figure in a blog post, including this one.

The subscription is the visible cost. The invisible cost is your time: expect several evenings of work, and accept that the result will look like a template, because it is one. That is a perfectly good trade when you are validating a new business. It becomes a poor trade when the website is how customers decide whether to trust you with real money.

Route 2: Hiring a freelancer

A competent freelance designer or developer in India typically charges ₹10,000–₹75,000 for a small business website, though rates vary hugely by city, experience and scope. Freelancers are the right choice when you know exactly what you want, can write your own content, and are comfortable managing the project.

The risks are concentration risks: one person is your designer, developer, project manager and support desk. Before you hire, ask three questions. Who owns the domain, hosting and code when the project ends — the answer must be "you". What happens if they are unavailable after launch? And is maintenance included, or billed separately?

Route 3: Hiring an agency

An agency brings a team — strategy, design, development, content and SEO — under one roof. For a small business brochure site of five to ten pages, agencies in India typically quote ₹40,000–₹2,00,000. E-commerce, booking systems and custom functionality typically start around ₹1,00,000 and can run into several lakh.

What are you paying for beyond the design? Mostly for the thinking: who the site is for, what action it should drive, how it will be found on Google, and how it will be measured.

What actually moves the price?

Six factors explain most of the difference between a ₹30,000 quote and a ₹3,00,000 one.

• Number of unique page designs. Ten pages using two layouts is cheap; ten pages that each need their own design is not.
• Custom design vs template. A template adapted to your brand costs a fraction of a ground-up design.
• Functionality. Contact forms are trivial. Payments, logins, booking calendars, multi-language support and CRM integrations each add real engineering.
• Content. If the agency must write your copy, shoot photos or make graphics, that is genuine extra work — and usually worth it, because content is what sells.
• E-commerce. Product catalogues, shipping rules, GST-compliant invoicing and payment gateway setup put a store in a different bracket from a brochure site.
• Who you hire. A large metro agency with big-brand clients prices differently from a lean remote studio doing the same quality of work.

The hidden costs nobody mentions in the quote

Budget for these regardless of route: a domain name (a modest annual fee, often ₹900–₹2,600); hosting, from a few hundred rupees a month for shared hosting upward, and usually included in builder subscriptions; an SSL certificate, often free now but confirm it — an "insecure" warning kills enquiries; maintenance, meaning software updates, backups, security patches and small edits, with the annual figure agreed in writing; professional email, usually a separate subscription; and photography and content updates, because stale content quietly erodes a good site.

A fair rule of thumb is to plan for 15–20% of the build cost per year to keep the site healthy. That is a working estimate based on what maintenance actually involves, not a published standard — and it is more defensible now that browsers ship every two weeks.

How to budget: a five-point checklist

Before you ask anyone for a quote, write down:

• The one action you want visitors to take — call, WhatsApp, order, book.
• A page list: every page you think you need, with one line on what it says.
• Who is writing the content, and who is supplying photos.
• Any systems the site must talk to — payments, booking, CRM, WhatsApp.
• Your realistic total budget for year one: build plus domain, hosting and maintenance.

Send the same written brief to every vendor. Quotes against the same brief are comparable; quotes against a vague phone call are not.

The bottom line

Pay for the website your business actually needs — no more, but also no less. A ₹5,000 template site that never brings an enquiry is more expensive than a ₹80,000 site that brings two customers a month.