Website Cost & Timeline Estimator
Pick your scope and get a range, not a number: what the build costs, how many weeks it takes, what it costs to run, and what conversion lift would make it pay for itself.
What it costs
- This is an estimate, not a quote. Ranges are seeded from the cost guides published on this site and narrowed to the work this studio takes on. They are not a quote.
Where the money goes
| Item | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify build, semi-custom | $7,000 | $18,000 |
| Catalogue size | × 1.20 | |
| Variants | × 1.04 | |
| Build total | $8,700 | $22,500 |
What it costs to run
| Item | Low | High | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform | $39.00 | $105 | Vendor's published plan pricing. Reviewed quarterly. |
| Apps & services | $20.00 | $120 | Scales with the features above. Subscriptions, reviews, search, email. |
| Maintenance | $150 | $400 | Matches the tiers in our maintenance guide. |
| Monthly total | $209 | $625 | $2,508–$7,500 a year |
Does it pay for itself?
Measured against the midpoint of the range, $15,600, and including the $417 a month the project adds to your running costs — so the two figures above are the same sum read in opposite directions. Put the required lift into the box on the left and the payback period comes back as 12 months. The required lift is a fact about arithmetic; the expected lift is your assumption, and this tool deliberately does not predict one — nothing here can see what your current site is doing wrong.
Your scope, as a brief
New build · Shopify · semi-custom · 150 products · standard support
The button below carries this straight into our contact form, so you can send it as a brief rather than retyping it. We quote a fixed price against it — and design your three most important pages free before you pay anything.
How to read your result
Why it is a range and never a number
Anything that gives you a single figure for a website is guessing, and usually guessing low so the number looks attractive. The same brief — 'a Shopify store for a fragrance brand' — covers a four-week theme fit and a four-month custom build, and the difference is in details no calculator can see: how ready your content is, how many stakeholders review each page, whether your product data needs rebuilding before it can be imported.
The low end of the range assumes a clear brief, prepared content and fast feedback. The high end assumes the opposite. Most projects land between the two, and the thing that moves a project toward the high end is almost never the technology.
The timeline is mostly not development
Most websites take four to twelve weeks, and the largest delays are consistently client-side: content that was not ready, feedback that arrived fragmented across three channels over two weeks, and scope that changed mid-build. Actual design and development on a standard store is a few weeks of that window; the rest is waiting and revision.
An urgent timeline compresses the schedule and costs about 25% more. What that money buys is sequencing and overtime, not magic — some of a build is genuinely sequential, and the tool caps how far compression goes for that reason.
Running costs are the line most budgets miss
A build is a one-off; a store is a subscription. Platform plan, the apps that deliver the features you picked, and maintenance together are a monthly figure that runs for as long as the store does — and over three years it frequently exceeds the build cost.
App costs scale with features rather than sitting flat, because that is how they actually behave: subscriptions, reviews, search and a wholesale portal each arrive with their own monthly line. If the running total looks high, the useful question is which features are earning it.
Payback asks what lift you need, not what lift you'll get
The payback panel reports the conversion lift required to break even inside your chosen window, because that is a fact about arithmetic. A prediction of what a redesign will do to your particular conversion rate would be a guess dressed up as a number, and this tool does not make them.
The figure includes what the project adds to your monthly bill, not just its build cost — so it is the same sum as the payback period, read in the other direction. Feed the required lift back in and the payback comes out at exactly the window you set. An earlier version of this panel left the running costs out of one side and not the other, which made the two figures disagree.
On the default scope — a $15,600 project for a store doing $50,000 a month at 40% margin, with about $417 a month of platform, apps and maintenance — breaking even inside a year needs roughly an 8.6% relative lift, or about 1.6% to 1.74% conversion. Whether that is modest or ambitious depends entirely on what the current site is doing wrong, which is what an audit is for.
How to improve this
The scope you just built pre-fills our contact form, so you can send it as a brief rather than retyping it. We quote a fixed price against that scope, and design your three most important pages free before you pay anything — so you are approving a design, not a proposal.
If the payback maths says the project needs a lift your current site is nowhere near, an audit before a rebuild is usually the cheaper order of operations: it tells you whether you need a new site or a fixed one.
Methodology and sources
Every formula and every default this tool uses, in full. If a number here looks wrong for your business, change it — the assumptions are inputs, not fixed rules.
- Build range
- (platform and design base + feature and integration add-ons) × catalogue × variants × migration × timeline multipliers, rounded to the nearest 100.
- Where the figures come from
- Seeded from the cost ranges published in our own guides, narrowed to the work this studio takes on. They are market ranges, not a quote, and not yet calibrated against our own quote history.
- Catalogue multiplier
- 1.0 under 25 products, rising to 1.8 at 5,000. Flattens above that: past 5,000 SKUs the work becomes a data project with a storefront attached and a dropdown cannot scope it.
- Migration multiplier
- Applied only to a migration. Products +10%, customers +6%, order history +12%, redirects +7%. Order history is the expensive one because it has to reconcile rather than import.
- Urgent timeline
- +25% on cost, ×0.8 on the schedule. Compression is capped because parts of a build are sequential.
- Timeline
- Base weeks by project type and design level, plus scope and catalogue. Framed against our build-timeline guide.
- Running costs
- Platform at the vendor's published plan pricing, apps scaled to the feature count, maintenance at the tiers in our maintenance guide. Reviewed quarterly.
- Required lift
- (project cost ÷ months + added monthly cost) ÷ (monthly revenue × gross margin). Relative, not percentage points — and it includes the running cost the project adds, so it is the exact inverse of the payback figure below. Put one into the other and you get your own number back.
- Payback months
- project cost ÷ (monthly revenue × gross margin × expected lift − added monthly cost). Returns nothing when the expected lift does not cover the added running cost.
- Added monthly cost
- Defaults to the midpoint of the running costs above, which is right for a new build. On a redesign you are usually already paying for the platform, so only the increase is genuinely added — the field is editable for that reason.
- Measured against
- The midpoint of the build range. The low end would flatter the payback and the high end would read as a scare number.
- Not included
- Payment processing (usually 2–3% per order), paid media, photography shoots, and any third-party licences you buy directly.
Sources
Frequently asked questions
How much does an e-commerce website cost?
Across the market, $2,000 to $150,000 and up. Most small stores on a customised Shopify theme land between $3,000 and $12,000, mid-size stores with 100–1,000 products between $12,000 and $40,000, large catalogues between $40,000 and $120,000, and custom or headless commerce above $80,000. The estimator narrows that to your actual scope, but it is still a range — the figure that matters is the quote against a written scope.
How long does it take to build an online store?
A store under 100 products typically takes 8 to 16 weeks end to end. Mid-size stores run 10 to 20 weeks and large catalogues can run four months or more. A redesign on the same platform is often 6 to 14 weeks — frequently longer than a new build, because it adds content auditing, URL mapping and redirect planning on top of the design work.
What does a website cost per month to run?
Platform, apps and maintenance together. Shopify's standard plans run roughly $39–$105 a month, Webflow $29–$74, and a custom Next.js build usually $20–$150 across hosting, a CMS plan and a CDN. Apps add anywhere from $20 to several hundred depending on what the store does. Maintenance is $50–$150 a month for basics, $150–$400 for a standard plan, and $400–$2,000+ for e-commerce with integration monitoring and an SLA.
Is a redesign worth it?
It depends on a number you can calculate: the relative conversion lift the project needs to pay for itself, including whatever it adds to your monthly running costs. A $15,600 project for a store doing $50,000 a month at 40% margin, carrying about $417 a month in platform, apps and maintenance, needs roughly an 8.6% relative lift — about 1.6% to 1.74% conversion — to break even in twelve months. Ignore the running costs and the same sum reads 6.5%, which is the more flattering number and the wrong one. If your current site has obvious structural problems, 8.6% is well within reach. If it is already well built, the same money is usually better spent on traffic.
Why is migration more expensive than a new build?
Because the design work is the same and the data work is extra. Products have to be exported, cleaned and remapped; customers and order history have to move without breaking; and every existing URL needs a redirect or you lose the search rankings you already have. Order history is the costly piece — it has to reconcile against what the old platform reported, not merely import.
Is this a quote?
No. It is a range built from published market figures narrowed to the work we take on, and it cannot see the things that actually move a project — how ready your content is, how many people review each page, what state your product data is in. The scope summary pre-fills our contact form so you can get a real fixed quote against it, with your three main pages designed free first.
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