Ask five studios in Zürich what a website costs and you will get five numbers that look unrelated. They are not. Almost every quote is built from the same handful of decisions, and once you know them you can read any offer and see where the money goes.
The three kinds of website
Do-it-yourself builders (Wix, Squarespace, Jimdo) cost a monthly subscription and your own time. They are a reasonable start for a side project. The hidden cost is the hours you spend fighting a template, and a site that looks like thousands of others in your category.
Template sites set up by someone else sit in the middle. A freelancer adapts an existing theme, adds your text and photos, and hands it over. Fast and affordable, but the structure was designed for nobody in particular.
Custom-designed sites start from your business: who your customers are, what they need to see before they call, what makes you different from the place down the street. This is where design actually earns money back, because the site is built to turn visitors into bookings, orders or enquiries.
What pushes the price up or down
- Number of pages and templates. A one-page site for a bakery and a twelve-page site for an accounting firm are different jobs.
- Languages. In Switzerland, German plus English or French is common. Each language is more copy, more checking, and more SEO work.
- Copywriting and photography. Whether you supply text and photos, or they are created for you, often matters more than the design itself.
- Functionality. Booking systems, online menus, shops and client portals each add setup and testing.
- Search visibility. A site that is technically correct for Google (structure, speed, metadata, Google Business Profile) takes more work than one that only looks good.
The running costs nobody mentions
A website is not a one-off purchase. Budget for a domain, hosting, email, and someone to make changes when your opening hours, prices or team change. Ask every studio what happens after launch: who updates the site, how fast, and at what cost. A cheap build with expensive or slow changes is not cheap.
How to compare quotes
Put the offers side by side and check that each one answers the same questions: how many pages, which languages, who writes the copy, is SEO included, what does hosting cost per year, and what does a small change cost after launch. Most of the difference between quotes disappears once you line those up.
The useful question is not "what does a website cost" but "what is one new customer worth to me, and how many does the site need to bring in to pay for itself".
If you want a quote built around your business, with every one of those lines spelled out, book a short call. We will tell you plainly if a simple template would do the job.