What a website actually costs in 2026 — and the 9-engine calculator I built to price it

Three quotes, same website, three very different numbers If you've ever asked "what does a website cost," you know the problem: you get three quotes for the same project and they land at $4,000, $11,000 and $18,000. None of them is lying. The spread is real — and it's explainable by a handful of variables you can actually pin down. I've scoped web projects since 2011, and I got tired of the only honest answer being "it depends." It does depend — but on a short list of things. So I turned my estimating logic into a free calculator and published the numbers behind it as an open dataset. Here's what the data says web work costs in 2026, and a little on how the tool works. Landing page: $300–$3,000 · 1–3 weeks WordPress business site: $1,200–$12,000 · 3–10 weeks Shopify store: $2,500–$25,000 · 2–8 weeks WooCommerce store: $3,000–$20,000 · 4–10 weeks Magento / Adobe Commerce: $15,000–$100,000+ · 8–24 weeks Custom web app: $5,000–$120,000+ · 6–20 weeks The timeline killer is almost never the code. It's content delivery and revision rounds. Pre-write your copy and lock the design in round two and you cut 3–5 weeks off any of these. Three multipliers do most of the damage: Region. The same spec legitimately prices from about 0.35x (South/SE Asia) to 1.45x (US/Canada) of the Western-Europe baseline. That's a ~4x spread with nobody scamming anyone — it's just where the developer sits. Freelancer vs agency. An agency quotes roughly 2.2–2.4x a freelancer for the same scope. You're paying for project management, QA and accountability, not different code. Platform. Shopify is cheap to build and you pay the platform forever; WooCommerce costs a bit more up front and you own hosting; Magento only makes sense with a dev on retainer (~2x WordPress pricing and 1.8x the timeline). Then smaller ones stack on top: a migration with redirects and content moves adds ~40% over a fresh build; a rush timeline up to +65%. Instead of one formula, it runs 9 small engines and composes them: hours estimation, platform multiplier, market rate, pricing tier, risk, complexity, timeline, monthly cost, and a rough ROI read. Each returns a factor or a figure; the orchestrator combines them into a range, a platform recommendation and a timeline. It stores nothing — the estimate is computed client-side and there's no signup or email gate. Stated accuracy is ±18%, calibrated against 600+ project quotes and public rate benchmarks across 6 markets. The numbers behind it — base costs, platform/region/tier multipliers, median project costs — are published as an open dataset you can use in your own work: JSON endpoint (no auth): https://projectcostestimator.com/api/cost-data Hugging Face (versioned): https://huggingface.co/datasets/zimzum1984/software-developer-hourly-rates-2026 Zenodo (DOI, archived): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21460256 Try it The calculator is free and needs no account: https://projectcostestimator.com/calculator Disclosure: I built it. I'd genuinely like to know where the numbers are off for your market or niche — corrections improve the next refresh.