Ask three agencies to quote for “a company website” and you will get three numbers that look unrelated. That is not usually dishonesty. It is that “website” describes an outcome, not a scope, and each quote silently assumes a different one.
Where the money actually goes
A website’s cost is mostly decided by four things, and none of them is the number of pages.
Who writes the content. This is the single largest hidden cost. If you supply finished text and images, the build is straightforward. If the agency has to interview you, draft the copy, and chase you for approval, that is several days of work that has nothing to do with code.
Whether you need to edit it yourself. A site whose text is fixed at build time is quicker and cheaper to produce than one with an admin panel behind it. The admin panel is worth paying for if you will genuinely use it — and pure overhead if you will ring us to change a phone number once a year.
What it has to connect to. A brochure site stands alone. The moment it must take payments, check stock, sync to an accounting package, or log in customers, you are commissioning software, and software is priced differently.
How much traffic it must survive. Most Nigerian SMEs do not need to plan for a hundred thousand concurrent visitors, and paying for that architecture up front is money set on fire.
Our numbers, and what they include
We publish starting prices because a quote you cannot sanity-check is not much use to you:
- Business website — from ₦150,000. Mobile-first, fast on Nigerian networks, proper page titles and structured data, contact form.
- Online store — from ₦300,000. The above plus a product catalogue, and an ordering path that works on a phone.
- Custom web application — from ₦500,000. Priced per project, because at this point the work is genuinely bespoke.
- Maintenance — from ₦30,000 a month. Updates, backups, security patches, small content changes. Optional, and not a lock-in.
Those are starting points, not ceilings. A larger scope costs more, and we tell you why before you commit.
Three questions that expose a bad quote
Ask any prospective developer these, and the answers will tell you more than the price will.
- Who owns the code and the domain when we are finished? The answer should be “you”, without hesitation. If the domain is registered in the agency’s name, changing supplier later becomes a negotiation.
- What happens after launch, and what does it cost? A quote that stops at launch is not a full price. Hosting, renewals, and updates continue.
- Can I see the site on a mid-range Android phone over mobile data? Not on the agency’s laptop over office wifi. Most of your customers are on the former, and a site that only feels fast on the latter is not fast.
If a quote is far below everything else you have been offered, it is worth asking which of the four cost drivers above it has quietly excluded. Usually it is the content, and usually the project stalls there.