When a client arrives with "we need a corporate website", they usually have a picture of the result but no model of how that result is assembled. So two quotes dozens of times apart read as "these people are honest and those are padding". Here's what actually sits behind the numbers.

Why the spread is so wide

Price is driven by the amount of logic, not the number of pages. A landing page and an online store can be built on the same technology, but the work behind them differs: the first is structure, design, a lead form and analytics; the second adds a filtered catalogue, a cart, payments, delivery states and sync with an accounting system.

Hence the spread. A standard landing page on a proven structure starts at ₸50,000 with us, an online store at ₸700,000, a course platform at ₸1,000,000. Those are floors: they rise with scope, not with the contractor's appetite.

The danger of a cheap offer isn't the number itself — it's that no scope is written down behind it. A ready-made template with your text and logo dropped in is also cheap, and if you need a page confirming the company exists, that's enough. Trouble starts when that site is expected to work: the block structure doesn't match how you explain the service, the form emails an inbox nobody checks, and any edit needs a person who knows that particular page builder.

The key test: ask what happens to an enquiry after someone presses "Send". If there's no clear answer, the site isn't wired into the company — it's a picture.

What a purpose-built site is made of

Our quote — from ₸50,000 for a standard landing page and from ₸700,000 for an online store — covers work that simply doesn't exist in the template version:

  • Research and prototype. Before design you need to know what a visitor must understand in ten seconds and where they click next. It's the cheapest stage and it saves the most.
  • Custom design. Not decoration, but structure: which blocks in which order, what's above the fold, where the call to action sits.
  • Development. Load speed, correct behaviour on phones, semantic markup that search engines can read.
  • A content panel. So a copy change takes you two minutes rather than an email and a wait.
  • SEO structure and analytics. Headings, URLs, markup, tracking. Retrofitting all of this costs more than building it in.
  • Testing. A separate person whose job is to break what the developer built.

What multiplies the cost

Price is driven by the amount of logic, not the number of pages. A filtered catalogue costs more than an "About us" section of the same word count. Three languages isn't triple the price of one, but it is noticeably more. A 1C or CRM integration is separate work with a life of its own and a staging environment.

As a rough guide, scope multiplies the base price like this: a template-based solution is the base, custom design roughly ×1.6, heavy logic roughly ×2.4. That isn't a formula from thin air — it's an average across our projects.

How not to overpay

  • Split the project into stages. First what brings leads. Catalogue, user accounts and integrations in a second pass, once it's clear they're what you need.
  • Arrive with the content ready. Copy, photography and service descriptions prepared in advance remove weeks of waiting.
  • Fix the scope. A fixed quote protects both sides: the contractor can't stretch the work and the client can't add requirements forever.

Red flags in a quote

Be careful if the proposal has no per-stage deadlines, doesn't say who owns the source code, doesn't describe what post-launch support covers, and doesn't state what happens to the price if scope grows. A site you can't take and hand to another team isn't an asset — it's a dependency.