Pricing guide
The hidden costs of a website: what the quote leaves out
The price in the quote is rarely the price you pay in year two.
A €1,200 website quote can quietly become €2,500 over the first two years without anyone technically lying to you: nobody told you everything, that is all. The annual licence for the premium theme and the commercial plugins adds roughly €50–300 a year. The "included" hosting is frequently a cheap package resold at 3–5 times market price. "Mandatory maintenance" surfaces only at signing, at a monthly rate that covers little beyond automatic updates. Content — copy, photography, translations — is silently assumed to come "from the client", and when you do not have it, you pay for it separately. The costliest surprise waits at the end: a site built so that you cannot move it to another supplier without paying an exit fee or rebuilding it from scratch. This page lists each of these costs with real market ranges, plus the exact questions to ask before signing rather than after. The patterns are documented from the Romanian web market — but if you have ever bought a website anywhere in Europe, you will recognise most of them on sight.
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Key takeaways
Theme and plugin licences: €50–300/year
The premium theme and the security, form or multilingual plugins renew annually. If the quote is silent on them, ask who pays from year two onward and in whose name the licences are bought.
Resold hosting: 3–5x market price
A hosting package costing the agency €3–5/month can be billed to you at €15–25/month under the label "premium hosting included". Ask what server it actually is and compare with the provider's public price.
Inflated maintenance: €30–100/month for nothing concrete
A "mandatory" subscription covering only automatic plugin updates is money lost. Real maintenance means verified backups, monitoring, guaranteed response times — demand the exact list of deliverables.
The exit fee: a site you cannot move
A site built on the agency's proprietary platform, a domain registered in their name, FTP access refused — each translates into hundreds or thousands of euros when you want to leave. Contractually secure code, full access and the domain in your company's name.
How to spot hidden costs in a quote, before signing
Ask for the breakdown by year, not just the build price: what you pay in year 1, year 2, year 3. An honest supplier answers in five minutes; one that dodges ("it depends", "we'll see") has something to hide. Then request the list of commercial licences used and written confirmation that they are purchased in your company's name, not the agency's — otherwise they stay behind when you leave. On hosting, ask directly: which provider hosts the server, and what does the package cost off the shelf? The gap between that answer and your invoice is their resale margin.
The ownership checkpoints: the domain registered to your company (verifiable free of charge via WHOIS, or at the national registry for country domains), full administrator access to both site and hosting, and the contractual right to move the site at any time without penalty. If the offer is silent on any of these, add the clauses yourself before signing. A "no" on any of them is not something you negotiate — it is something you walk away from. The real cost of a website is never the quoted price; it is the quoted price plus everything you discover in year two, and your job is to discover all of it on day zero.
Frequently asked questions
Is it normal for the agency to bill me mandatory monthly maintenance?
Maintenance itself is legitimate and even advisable, but making it "mandatory" as a condition of the build contract is a warning sign. You should be free to decline the subscription and pay for interventions on demand, or contract maintenance elsewhere — if the offer forbids that, you are bound to the supplier by contract, not by quality.
How do I check whether the quoted hosting carries a heavy markup?
Ask for the real provider's name (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, a local host) and the package specifications, then look up the public price on that provider's site. A 20–30% margin for administration is reasonable; 300–500% is a margin on your not knowing.
What happens to theme and plugin licences if I switch suppliers?
If the licences were bought on the agency's account — the most common practice — you lose them on departure and buy them again, at roughly €50–300 a year. Insist from the start that commercial licences be purchased on an account belonging to your company, invoiced in your name.
Who pays for the website's copy and photography?
If the quote does not specify, implicitly you do — and not only in money but in weeks of delay, because client-supplied content is the single most common bottleneck in a web project. Professional copywriting runs about €30–80 per page and a photo session €200–600; make the quote state who delivers each, and when.
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Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247