How much does a website cost in South Africa? (2026)

"How much does a website cost?" is the most-searched question about websites in South Africa, and the least answered. Agencies say "it depends" and ask for a call. It does depend — but not on anything mysterious, and a straight answer is possible. This is it.

The short answer: what I charge

I publish my prices, so start there. They're once-off, and the site is yours when it's done.

• One-page website — R6,499. Everything on one fast page: who you are, what you do, a quote or WhatsApp button that actually works. Right for a trade, a consultant, a new business that needs to exist online properly.
• Business website — R11,999. Multiple pages — services, about, contact, usually a few more — hand-coded, mobile-first, with on-page SEO and lead capture built in. Right for most established small businesses.
• Online store — from R19,999. Catalogue, cart, stock and payments, engineered rather than plugged in. The "from" is honest: a store with 40 products and a store with 1,250 are different amounts of work.

Those are the numbers. The rest of this article is about why other quotes land where they do, and what to look for behind them.

What actually moves the price

Every website quote in the country is some mix of the same five things.

1. How many pages, and how much of the content exists

A page is not just a page — it's the words, the images and the decisions about what goes where. If you have your content written and photographed, you're paying for build. If you don't, someone is writing and sourcing it, and that's a large share of the work on most projects. The cheapest way to reduce a quote is to arrive with your content ready.

2. Template or hand-coded

A template site (WordPress theme, Wix, Squarespace) is fast to set up, which is why it's cheap. The cost moves to later: plugins that need updating, a theme that breaks when the platform changes, and a monthly fee for the privilege. A hand-coded site takes longer to build and has nothing to update, nothing to hack through, and loads faster — which Google measures. Neither is wrong; they're different purchases.

3. Selling online

E-commerce roughly doubles a project, for good reasons: stock, variants, payments (PayFast, Yoco, Ozow), shipping rules, VAT, order emails. A store that "just needs a cart" never just needs a cart.

4. Integrations

Booking calendars, accounting exports, a CRM, WhatsApp automation, a client login. Each one is scoped honestly or it's scoped badly. Some are an afternoon; some are a project on their own.

5. Who's doing it

An agency has an office, an account manager and a design team to pay before a line of code is written. A one-person studio doesn't, which is why the same site can be quoted at three prices that are all "fair" for the business quoting them. Ask who will actually build your site and who you'll speak to when something breaks.

The costs that aren't on the quote

"The website was R3,500. We've paid R400 a month for it ever since."

That sentence, or one like it, comes up in most first conversations I have. Look for these before you sign anything:

• Monthly fees for your own site. Hosting is a real cost (R100–R300 a month is normal for a business site). A "maintenance plan" that you can't cancel without losing the site is not hosting — it's rent. Ask plainly: if I stop paying, do I keep the website?
• Who owns it. With a builder platform you never own the site; you rent an account. With some agencies the code stays theirs. With me, a website is a once-off build and the code is yours — host it anywhere, move it whenever you like. (That's different from a business system, which is licensed on a monthly plan; two different products, priced two different ways, on purpose.)
• Domain and email. Your .co.za domain should be registered in your name, not the designer's. It's about R100 a year. If someone else holds it, they hold your business's address.
• "SEO included". Sometimes this means proper titles, descriptions, structured data and a sitemap — which every site should have and mine do. Sometimes it means nothing. Ask what, specifically.

When the cheap option is the right one

Honestly: sometimes it is. If you're testing an idea, if you need a page up this week to attach to a Facebook ad, if the business may not exist in a year — a builder page for a few hundred rand is the correct decision, and a developer who tells you otherwise is selling. Come back when the idea has proven itself and the R400-a-month plan starts to feel like what it is.

How to judge any website quote

1. Is the price on their own website? If a designer won't publish a starting price, ask why the number needs to depend on who's asking.
2. Once-off or monthly — and what happens if you stop paying?
3. Who owns the code and the domain at the end?
4. Can you open three sites they built? Not screenshots. Live sites, on your phone, right now.
5. What does "SEO" and "mobile-friendly" mean in the quote, specifically?

If the answers are clear, the price is probably fair — whatever it is. If they aren't, no price is.

What I'd tell a friend

Spend once, own it, and spend on the content before you spend on the design. A hand-coded business site at R11,999 that you own and that loads in a second will out-earn a R3,500 template you rent for five years — and it costs less over that time, too. If your business is in Pretoria or Gauteng, I'm local; if it isn't, the work happens online anyway.

See every price, published