Every few days someone forwards us a screenshot. Usually it's an Instagram ad or a WhatsApp message from a relative's friend: “Professional website, ₹999 only.” The question that comes with it is some polite version of why anyone would pay more.
Fair question. The honest answer is that the ₹999 might be a perfectly real price. It just isn't the price of the website. It's the price of one part of it, and the other parts arrive later, on different invoices, sometimes from different people.
We sell a cheap website ourselves, so we're not here to tell you cheap is bad. We're here to tell you what to ask before you pay.
The number on the ad is the build
When a freelancer or a small studio quotes a low fixed price for a basic site, what they're usually pricing is the hours to set up four or five pages on a theme or a starter layout they've used before. Home, about, services, contact, maybe a gallery. That work genuinely doesn't take long once you've done it a hundred times. We know, because we have.
So a low build price isn't a scam by itself. The problems start with everything the quote is silent about.
Domain and hosting: the yearly bill nobody mentions
Your domain (yourclinic.in, say) is rented, not bought. You pay for it every year. Hosting, the server the site lives on, is the same. Neither is expensive for a small site, but neither is free, and a lot of cheap packages either skip them in the quote or bundle a first year at a promotional rate that jumps on renewal.
The bigger issue isn't money. It's ownership. We've lost count of the businesses who came to us wanting to move their site and discovered the domain was registered in the original developer's account. The developer had changed numbers. The domain was due for renewal in three weeks.
Register the domain yourself, with your own email, and pay for it yourself. Give the developer access. Never the account.
When we quote, domain and hosting are listed separately for exactly this reason. You should be able to see what you're paying for each year, and you should be the one holding the keys.
Content is the real cost, and it's usually yours
This is the one that catches people out. A ₹999 or ₹1,999 website almost never includes writing. Somebody has to decide what the about page says, which services get listed, what the prices are, which photos go up. At that price, that somebody is you.
Which is fine. Nobody knows your business better than you do, and for a small site the text doesn't need to be clever. But it does need to exist. If you don't send it, one of two things happens. Either the site sits half-built for weeks, or the developer fills it with generic lines (“We are committed to excellence and customer satisfaction”) that could belong to any business on earth.
Professional copywriting and a proper photoshoot are where the money goes on more expensive sites. Not the code.
Revisions
Ask how many changes are included and for how long. Then ask what counts as a change.
“Unlimited revisions” sounds generous. In practice it often means the developer will slow down answering you once the project stops paying. A small, clear number is more honest. Fixing a phone number or swapping a paragraph is a minor change. Redesigning the home page because your brother-in-law didn't like the blue is not.
On our ₹1,999 business website, that number is three minor text changes within the first month. We picked it because that's roughly what most people need after launch: a typo they spot, a timing that changed, one service they forgot. More than that and it's a new piece of work, and we say so upfront.
The small things that cost you later
- Business email. Having info@yourbusiness.in is separate from the website and usually billed separately too.
- SSL.The padlock in the browser. Most decent hosting includes it now, but check, because a site without it shows a “Not secure” warning.
- Backups. If the site breaks or gets hacked, can it be restored? Who does that?
- Someone to call. The thing people miss most. Six months in, the contact form stops sending emails. Who fixes it, and does it cost extra?
That last one is why we include free technical support on the basic package. Not redesigns, not new pages. Just the boring stuff that breaks, fixed without a new quote.
When the cheap site is the wrong purchase
A basic site is a digital visiting card. It tells people you exist, what you do, where you are and how to reach you. For a lot of small businesses that's exactly enough, and spending more is wasteful.
It stops being enough the moment the website has to dosomething. Take bookings. Accept payments. Show stock that changes daily. Let students log in. Rank for competitive searches across a city. Those need planning, custom work and ongoing attention, and no honest studio will build them for four figures. If that's where you are, our website development cost guide breaks down what the bigger builds involve, and our custom web development page explains how we approach them.
One more thing. Before you compare two quotes, write down what each one includes, line by line. Domain, hosting, number of pages, who writes the text, how many changes, support after launch. Half the time the cheaper quote turns out to be the same price once you fill in the blanks. The other half, it really is cheaper, and that's fine too.
You just want to know which half you're in before you pay.