The honest answer is "it depends on what the site needs to do" — here's how to think about the real cost drivers before you ask for a quote.
Every "how much does a website cost" answer that gives you a single number without asking what the site needs to do is guessing. The real cost is driven by a handful of specific factors, and understanding them will get you a far more useful quote than shopping by price alone.
A template builder (Squarespace, Wix, a theme on WordPress) gets a simple brochure site live cheaply and quickly. The tradeoff is a ceiling on speed, customization, and how far the site can grow — you can't easily turn a template site into a booking system or customer portal later without starting over.
A custom-built site costs more upfront but has no such ceiling. If there's any chance the site needs to grow into something more than a brochure — booking, a customer login, e-commerce — building it as real, owned code from the start avoids paying for the same work twice.
Number of unique page templates (not pages — templates), not raw page count, is a bigger cost driver than most people expect. Ten blog posts using one template cost far less than five pages that each need a different layout.
Integrations are the other big one: a contact form is cheap; a form that creates a real record in your CRM, triggers an automated follow-up email, and books a calendar slot is a different scope entirely — even though a visitor sees roughly the same form either way.
Content (real copy and photography, not placeholder text) is frequently underestimated. A site can be built fast, but writing genuinely good copy for it takes real time, and a technically excellent site with generic filler copy converts worse than a simpler site with copy that actually speaks to the visitor.
A website is not a one-time purchase if it's doing real work for the business. Hosting, security updates, content changes, and SEO all need someone's attention on an ongoing basis — factor that into the real cost of ownership, not just the launch invoice.