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What does a website cost in 2026?

A business website in the Netherlands costs roughly €0 to €10,000 to build in 2026, plus €150 to €3,000 a year for hosting, maintenance and changes. The biggest variable is not the design. It is who does the work: you, a freelancer, an agency, or a subscription that covers both building and upkeep.

A range that wide is useless when you are holding a quote. So this page unpacks it: the four routes with their real price tags, the costs that rarely make it onto a quote, and a three-year sum. Three years, because that is roughly how long a website lasts, not one month.

Why do the prices vary so much?

You are not paying for pages. You are paying for hours and for who carries the responsibility. Two sites that look equally good can cost €500 and €7,500, because one is a template in your colours and the other is bespoke design, copywriting, integrations and project management. The right question about a quote is not "what does it cost", but "what is in it, and what does it cost after that".

What is usually in a build price, and what is not?

A quote for a business site usually covers: a design based on a theme or template, an agreed number of pages, placing your copy and images, a contact form, the basic SEO settings and one round of revisions. What it usually leaves out: copywriting, photography, integrations with other systems, hosting after the first year, and every change made after launch. Ask for that second list in writing. That list is your second year.

Which costs never make it onto the quote?

This is where most comparisons break down. The build price is a one-off; almost everything else returns every year. In the Dutch market you typically run into these:

• Hosting: €5 to €30 per month for shared hosting, €20 to €60 for managed WordPress. Over a year: €60 to €720.
• Domain name: a .nl domain usually renews at €10 to €20 per year. The first year is often discounted; the renewal is not.
• SSL certificate: free at most hosts via Let's Encrypt. If your invoice shows €50 to €100 a year for one, ask what you are paying for.
• Themes, plugins and licences: a premium theme runs €50 to €100 once, and paid plugins for forms, SEO, backups or translation add up to €100 to €400 per year. They expire, too: an expired plugin stops receiving security updates.
• Maintenance: a care plan costs €25 to €150 per month in the market for updates, backups and monitoring. On WordPress that is not a luxury: the system runs on plugins that keep changing.
• Copy changes: usually billed hourly, or from a prepaid bundle of five or ten hours that expires after a year. Watch the minimum per request: at a one-hour minimum, changing your opening hours costs the same as rewriting half a page.
• Security and recovery: cleaning up a hacked site typically costs €300 to €1,500, plus the days your site is offline or flagged as unsafe by Google.
• SEO: visibility is rarely part of the build price. Standalone SEO work starts around €300 per month in the market, and after launch nearly every change to it is quoted as extra work.
• Redesign: most sites last three to four years before they start to feel dated. Then the build price starts over.

Add it up and a "cheap" €1,500 site easily costs €2,500 to €4,000 over three years. That is not your supplier being sneaky. It is how the model works: you buy a moment, when what you need is a period.

What does a website cost per month?

Convert everything into a monthly figure and the difference finally shows. With a one-off build you pay only hosting each month (€5 to €30) and optional maintenance (€25 to €150). But by then you have already paid the build price. Spread the €4,300 from the table above over 36 months and that agency site costs about €119 per month. Grow is €29 per month with annual billing, or €43.99 if you pay monthly. That is the fair comparison: monthly against monthly, over the same period.

When is a one-off build actually cheaper?

You rarely read this side of it on a vendor's own page, so here it is. Take a tidy €750 freelance site with €10-per-month hosting and no maintenance contract. Over three years: €750 + €360 = €1,110. That sits right next to Grow's €1,047. For a site like that, price is not the deciding factor.

What decides it is what happens next. If nothing about your site changes for three years, a one-off build is fine and sometimes cheaper. If you want a new page every quarter, prices updated, a campaign landed, the hourly rate starts stacking and the comparison flips. Rule of thumb: the more static the site, the better a one-off build looks; the more you use it as a sales channel, the sooner a subscription wins.

What drives the price up or down?

• Number of pages: a one-pager is a day's work; fifteen pages with their own copy is a project. Each extra bespoke page usually adds a few hundred euros to a quote.
• Bespoke design or template: a template in your colours with your logo is the cheapest route. Original design, revision rounds included, is often the single most expensive line on a quote.
• Copy: copywriting is almost always quoted separately. Supplying it yourself is cheaper, but only if you actually do: unfinished copy is the number one reason website projects run late.
• Integrations: connecting a booking system, CRM, newsletter or payment provider costs development hours, even when the tools themselves are cheap.
• Selling: the moment products, stock, payments, shipping and returns enter the picture, you are looking at a different kind of project with a different budget. FWRD deliberately does not build online stores and refers that work on.
• Multiple languages: an extra language is not just translation but maintenance: every change afterwards has to happen twice.

What does a web developer cost per hour?

Hourly rates in the Netherlands in 2026 generally look like this: a freelance web designer or WordPress developer charges €45 to €85 per hour, an experienced specialist €85 to €125, and an agency €95 to €150. Agencies lean on project prices and half-day blocks; freelancers more often bill by the hour or by the job.

What surrounds the rate matters more than the rate. €65 an hour with a two-hour minimum per request is more expensive in practice than €95 an hour billed per quarter-hour. Ask explicitly whether copy changes after launch fall under warranty or under extra work: that answer is the difference between a quiet second year and an expensive one.

What does a website cost at FWRD?

Honestly: if you need a website once and never look at it again, FWRD is not the cheapest option: building it yourself in a site builder is. FWRD is built for the year after launch. You build for free, you publish, and you pay only when the site actually has to go live.

Free costs €0: one site, up to ten pages, on your own .fwrd.digital address. Grow costs €29 per month with annual billing (€43.99 if you pay monthly) and gives you your own domain, unlimited pages and 450 credits per month. A new page costs about ten. Pro costs €57 per month with annual billing (€87.99 monthly) and runs unlimited sites. Hosting is included and there are no setup fees.

And the small print out loud: the free plan is always set to noindex and carries an FWRD badge, so Google will not list a site on it. Your own domain and indexing start at Grow. Free is for building and finding out whether this fits, not for being found. And if you need to sell with stock, payments and shipping, FWRD is not your platform. We would rather refer you on.