Most of you have probably heard things like: "Why overpay for a website? AI can build one in 20 minutes" or "My friend got a website done for €70." And there's some truth to that — the same way you can "build a house" out of a shipping container with a mattress thrown inside. The question is whether we're talking about something that simply exists, or a tool that's genuinely meant to make money and hold up for years.
The Problem You Can't See at First Glance
This is where something rarely said out loud comes in: people price websites based on what they can see. You visit a finished project — it looks nice, works on mobile, has a contact form. Everything seems fine.
But how would you know what's missing, if you've never had a reason to know?
That's the fundamental paradox of this industry. If you don't know Core Web Vitals exist, you won't know your site might be failing them. If you don't know the law requires proper cookie and user data management, you won't know you're operating in violation of GDPR. If you don't know a website should be accessible to screen reader users, you won't know that a portion of your potential customers may struggle to use it.
And here's the second problem: some of the people offering to build websites don't know this either. Or they do — but they don't say anything, because the client doesn't ask, so why complicate things.
"AI Website in 30 Minutes" — Where Does the Marketing End?
AI today can generate a pretty decent layout, write copy, and assemble it all into a reasonably good-looking frontend. I use these tools practically every day and think they're excellent for MVPs, prototypes, and simple landing pages.
I remember my first AI-assisted projects. From the outside, they looked fine. The problem was what was under the hood — total chaos. No coherent architecture, every component doing its own thing. I'd want to change something in the layout and suddenly find myself hunting through the entire codebase because "it's done differently here, differently there, and somewhere else it's something else entirely." A technical disaster. But I didn't know that at the time, because I didn't yet know what I didn't know. It took thousands of hours in front of a screen to figure it out.
The core issue is that AI takes no responsibility for the final result.
It'll generate a site that looks great in Chrome but breaks on a MacBook. Will it work the same way on Android on a weak connection? Will forms blow up on Safari? Will Google consider it fast and accessible enough to rank it well? AI won't answer those questions — because those are things that only surface with deeper work.
That's exactly why many companies end up back at square one after a year. The site that was supposed to be "ready in 20 minutes" turns into a nightmare the moment you need to make a significant change. Or it simply fails to deliver what it was built for in the first place — customers, enquiries, sales.
The most expensive website is very often the one you have to build twice.
What Actually Determines Website Quality?
Let's start with what you usually can't see in a screenshot.
Performance and Core Web Vitals — Google measures your site the same way users experience it. How quickly anything appears, whether elements jump around while loading, how fast the page responds to clicks. A site that takes 7 seconds to load loses users before they've read a single word — and drops in search rankings. Both problems at once.
Structure and semantics — Google doesn't see your beautiful gradient or animations. Google sees code. It sees the structure of your site, the heading hierarchy, and whether the whole thing makes sense as a document — is it logically organised content, or chaos wrapped in a pretty design? The former gets organic traffic. The latter doesn't.
Tied to SEO is structured data — additional information encoded specifically for search engines, allowing Google to display not just a title and description in results, but also ratings, product prices, or event dates. These are the expanded listings that catch the eye far more than plain links.
Accessibility — a website should work correctly for people using screen readers, navigating by keyboard only, or struggling to distinguish colours. WCAG standards set out specific requirements here; in many industries, compliance is a legal obligation. But beyond the law — these are real users. Ignoring them isn't just an ethics issue, it's leaving money on the table.
UX and UI are terms often used interchangeably, though they mean different things. UI is the visual layer — how the site looks. UX is the broader experience — whether it's easy to find what you're looking for, whether the purchase or contact process doesn't frustrate you halfway through. You can have beautiful UI and terrible UX. The result: the site looks great but doesn't convert. The visitor browsed, but never got in touch.
Law, Cookies, and Things That "Don't Matter Until Suddenly They Do"
This is probably the most neglected area — because it's boring, invisible, and doesn't appear in any portfolio screenshot.
Every site that collects user data — and practically every site does, even just through Google Analytics — falls under GDPR. The user must have a genuine opportunity to give consent before any data is collected. Hence cookie banners — but a pop-up alone isn't enough. The whole mechanism, the so-called consent mode, needs to be implemented correctly, not just aesthetically.
Form security is something clients tend to remember only after they start receiving spam through their own site, or worse, when a form is exploited to attack the server. A properly secured form isn't a bonus — it's a baseline.
Most people find out about these things too late. When a security incident occurs, a fine from the data protection authority arrives, or the site drops out of search results because Google deemed it non-compliant. And then it turns out the "cheap website" wasn't cheap at all.
What Does a Good Website REALISTICALLY Cost in 2026?
It depends on what you actually need.
A simple company website with a few subpages, basic SEO, solid responsiveness, and decent performance is in the range of €350–700. That's not a "cheap website" — it's the lower limit of what can be done properly.
If you need custom design, a content management system, expanded sections, animations, and stronger technical SEO, the conversation starts at €700–1,400.
An online store, web application, or integrations with external systems — that's €1,400 and up, where the price depends on the specific scope of work.
And yes, you can pay less. Just like you can buy a bike for €90 at a supermarket. The question is whether it'll be rideable in a year — and whether anyone will want to fix it when it falls apart.
Summary
A good website isn't just about looks. It's performance, UX, SEO, accessibility, security, and a host of things the user will never see — but which determine whether the site actually works as a business tool.
That knowledge has a cost. It's thousands of hours in front of a screen. Mountains of documentation, video tutorials, trial and error. Money lost on projects that didn't convert because the architecture was wrong, or on AI revisions that kept bringing you back to the same place in circles. I've used AI for absolutely everything — UI, UX, planning, architecture, backend, complex refactors, cache configuration, microservice orchestration. I know where it helps and where it just pretends to.
You don't know what you don't know. And that's normal. The problem starts when someone offering to build websites doesn't know either — or is counting on the fact that you won't ask.
That's exactly why a website can't cost less than a day's wages in hospitality. Not because someone wants to make a quick buck. But because behind the price there's something real — or there's nothing at all.
If you want a website that doesn't just exist, but actually works and grows alongside your business — feel free to get in touch.
Ps. What do you think about merchendise with appcrates.pl logo? 😂
