Ask five Pakistani agencies to quote the same website and you will get numbers between 25,000 and 900,000 rupees. Buyers usually read that spread as evidence that somebody is overcharging. Usually nobody is. They are quoting five different products, because the brief did not specify which one.
Here is what the price bands actually contain, what pushes a quote from one band to the next, and the recurring costs that most quotes leave out entirely.
What each price band buys in 2026
25,000 to 80,000 PKR: template site
A purchased WordPress or Shopify theme, your logo and content dropped in, five to eight pages, a contact form. Two weeks. No custom design, no custom functionality, no performance work.
This is a legitimate product and the right answer for a new business that needs to exist online this month. What you are buying is presence, not a marketing asset. Do not expect it to rank, convert or scale.
80,000 to 250,000 PKR: designed business website
Custom design against your brand, ten to twenty pages, proper responsive behaviour, on-page SEO structure, an editable CMS, basic analytics. Four to eight weeks.
This is the band most established SMEs should be in. The jump from the band below is mostly design and structure, and it is the difference between a site that describes your business and one that sells for it.
250,000 to 600,000 PKR: ecommerce or content-heavy site
Product catalogue, cart and checkout, one or two payment integrations, order management, courier integration, customer accounts. Or a large content site with search, filtering, and a serious editorial workflow. Eight to fourteen weeks.
Cost here is driven by integration count and catalogue complexity far more than by page count. Fifty simple products is cheaper than eight products with variants, size charts, and stock split across three branches.
600,000 to 2,000,000+ PKR: custom web application
A portal, marketplace, booking platform, dashboard or SaaS product. User roles and permissions, business logic, third-party APIs, an admin panel, real security requirements. Three to nine months.
At this point you are not buying a website. You are commissioning software, and it should be scoped like software. Our note on custom versus off-the-shelf is the decision to settle before you commission anything in this band.
The six things that actually move a quote
1. Custom design versus a theme
The largest single lever below the application band. A designed site means wireframes, revisions, and a developer building layouts from scratch rather than filling slots. It typically triples the design line and adds 40 to 60% to frontend build.
2. Integration count
Every external system (payment gateway, courier, WhatsApp, CRM, ERP, accounting, SMS) is separate engineering with its own testing and its own failure handling. One or two is a footnote. Six is a project inside the project. This is the most common reason a quote lands higher than the client expected.
3. Content
Most quotes assume you are supplying finished text and images. Most clients are not. If the agency has to write copy, source photography and structure the pages, add 50,000 to 200,000 depending on page count. This is the most frequent cause of a project stalling for a month, and it is almost always the client side that stalls it.
4. Who is building it
A freelancer charges 500 to 1,500 PKR per hour, a small agency 1,500 to 3,500, an established software house 3,000 to 8,000. The difference is not skill alone: it is having a designer, a QA process, and somebody who answers when a payment gateway breaks eight months later. For a template site, the freelancer is the correct economic choice. For anything touching payments or customer data, it usually is not.
5. Performance and SEO structure
Sites that load fast and are structured for search cost more to build, because both are engineering rather than settings. If it is not an explicit line item in the quote, assume it was not done. Our guide to technical SEO fixes that actually move rankings covers what should be in scope.
6. Revision rounds
Cheap quotes include two rounds. Projects with an undefined approver on the client side routinely run to six. Agree the number and name one decision-maker before signing. This single clause prevents more budget overrun than anything else on this list.
The recurring costs that get left out
- Domain: 2,500 to 6,000 PKR per year.
- Hosting: 8,000 to 25,000 per year for shared; 60,000 to 300,000 for VPS or cloud once you have real traffic or an application.
- SSL: usually free now via Let’s Encrypt. If someone is charging 15,000 a year for a basic certificate, ask why.
- Maintenance: 30,000 to 150,000 per year. Plugin and core updates, backups, security patching, small fixes. Skipping this is how WordPress sites get compromised.
- Content updates: either a retainer or your own staff time. It is never zero.
Budget 15 to 25% of the build cost annually to keep a site healthy. A quote that shows a build price and nothing else has not made the cost disappear; it has moved it to next year.
Five ways to spend less without buying less
- Have the content ready before you sign. The highest-return week of work available to you, and it costs nothing.
- Launch with the pages that earn. Home, services, one case study, contact. Add the rest after launch. Phase-one scope creep is the most expensive kind.
- Cut integrations you are not using yet. Every “we might want this later” integration is paid for now and tested now.
- Name one approver. Committee feedback is the main driver of revision-round overrun.
- Buy a theme for the template band, and custom above it. Custom design on a five-page brochure site rarely returns its cost. On an ecommerce or lead-generation site it usually does.
The question worth asking every agency
“Show me a site you built two years ago that is still running well, and tell me what it cost to build and what it has cost to keep running since.”
Agencies who cannot answer have not maintained enough work to know. Agencies who can will tell you something more useful than a price.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a basic website cost in Pakistan?
25,000 to 80,000 PKR for a template-based site of five to eight pages, delivered in about two weeks. Below 25,000 you are typically buying an unmodified theme with your logo on it.
Why are agency quotes so much higher than freelancer quotes?
Agencies carry designers, QA and post-launch support. For a simple brochure site that overhead is not worth paying for. For ecommerce, payments or anything holding customer data, it usually is.
How long does a business website take?
Two weeks for a template site, four to eight weeks for a custom-designed business site, eight to fourteen for ecommerce. Content readiness is the most common cause of delay in all three.
Is WordPress or a custom-built site better value?
WordPress is better value up to the point where you are fighting it: usually when you need custom business logic, complex user roles, or heavy traffic. We have written the full comparison in WordPress vs custom websites.
Ezitech has built web platforms for clients in 42 countries across fifteen years, from brochure sites to custom SaaS. Tell us what you are trying to ship and we will tell you honestly what band it sits in.
Related: What software actually costs in Pakistan — every Ezitech cost guide in one place.