What a website actually costs in Faisalabad

Almost every first call starts with the same question. What will this cost? Most agency websites in Pakistan will not answer it, so people end up collecting quotes that range from twenty thousand rupees to half a million and have no way to compare them.

This post explains what you are actually paying for, so you can read a quote properly instead of guessing.

Price follows scope, not page count

Quotes are often priced per page. That is a poor way to think about it. Ten pages of plain text are far cheaper than one page that takes payments.

What actually moves the number is this:

• Does anyone need to log in? Accounts, roles and passwords add real work.
• Does money change hands? Checkout, refunds and failed payments are where most budgets go.
• Does it connect to something else? A CRM, a courier, an accounting system.
• Who updates it later? A site your team edits costs more to build and less to run.
• How much design is bespoke? A custom layout costs more than a considered template.

The three bands most projects fall into

A site that explains your business

A few pages, your services, your contact details, and a form that reaches your inbox. This is the right choice for most local businesses that need to look credible when someone searches for them. It is the cheapest and fastest thing to build.

An online store

Products, a cart, and a checkout. In Pakistan that also means cash on delivery handled properly, plus the courier handover. Expect this to cost several times a simple site, because the parts that break are the parts customers pay through.

A web application

Logins, dashboards, permissions and data. This is software, not a website, and it is priced like software. It is also where a fixed quote matters most, because scope creep here is expensive.

Questions worth asking before you pay a deposit

• Who owns the code and the accounts when this is finished?
• Is the price fixed, or does it move if the work takes longer?
• What happens after launch, and what does support cost?
• Can my own team edit the content without calling you?
• How fast will it load on a phone, on mobile data?

That last one matters more than most people expect. Google treats a page as fast only if it loads its main content in under 2.5 seconds on real visits. A cheap site that fails that is not cheap, because it will not rank.

The honest summary

A low quote is not automatically a bad deal, and a high one is not automatically thorough. What matters is whether the quote states the scope clearly enough that you could hold someone to it. If it does not, the price is meaningless.

Written by Mudassar Zafar, a web developer in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Get in touch if you have a project in mind.