"How much does a website cost?" is the first thing people ask us, and the honest answer starts with "it depends". That isn't us dodging. A five-page company site and a shop with a thousand products share one word, "website", and very little else. Here's what goes into the price, so you can compare quotes on something real.
What you're paying for
The number of pages, how many different kinds of page there are, and how many languages. The design, where an adapted template costs less than something drawn from scratch for your brand. Copy and photos: do you have them, or do they need writing, translating and shooting? Features such as forms, a catalogue, filters, online payment, a calculator, or a link to your CRM or accounts. And the work that helps Google understand the site: its structure, a title and description for every page, speed on a phone.
Three rough brackets
In Chișinău, published prices for a simple business website start at around 3,000 lei. An online shop usually costs several times that, because it comes with a catalogue, payments, delivery and order management. Anything with its own logic, such as bookings, client accounts or connections to other systems, gets estimated individually once the requirements are clear.
What you pay after launch
- The .md domain, once a year.
- Hosting, monthly or yearly, depending on traffic and how heavy the site is.
- The security certificate (HTTPS), which often comes free with the hosting.
- Maintenance: updates, backups, monitoring and small edits.
Ask for the cost of the whole first year after launch, not just the project price.
Why two quotes for "the same site" can differ threefold
Because they're rarely for the same site. One includes the copy, the Russian version, the optimisation and a year of maintenance. The other is empty pages. One is a template, the other an original design. Put the quotes next to each other and compare what you actually get, line by line, before you look at the total.
Five questions before you say yes
- What exactly is included: design, copy, translation, images, optimisation?
- Whose name will the domain be in, and who holds the logins?
- What will hosting and maintenance cost per year after launch?
- How many rounds of changes are included?
- How long will it take, and how is it paid: up front, in stages, or at the end?
We go into these in more detail in our guide to choosing an IT company.
Getting an exact price from us
Send us a few lines about your business and what the site should do. We'll come back with a price range and a realistic timeline, and after a short call, a fixed quote that lists everything you'll get. What we include is on our website development page.