What a website costs in Kolhapur, and what ₹25,000 includes

Most confusion about what a website costs comes from comparing three different things. A website tells people who you are and lets them reach you: pages, a contact form and an admin panel. A store is a website that also takes money: a catalogue, a cart, payments and orders. A platform has accounts in it: people log in and do something, such as take a test, book a slot or see their own records.

The first two have published prices here. The third is priced after a call, because what it has to do decides what it costs. If you are not sure which one you need, working that out is the first thing a good developer should help you with, before any number is mentioned.

The standard website package covers the whole build and the first year of running it:

• A layout designed for your business rather than a template
• Pages written by hand, not assembled from a theme or a page builder
• An admin panel for the parts you will want to change yourself: pictures, text, prices
• Contact and enquiry forms that notify you, with every submission stored
• Performance work, so the site still loads on an older Android phone on mobile data
• The technical side of search: titles, descriptions, a sitemap and structured data
• Hosting, security, daily backups, bug fixes and support for the first year

The standard online store is the same website with the selling side built on top:

• Catalogue, collections and product pages with real stock counts
• Checkout taking UPI, cards, net banking and cash on delivery
• Orders, invoices and stock in an owner's dashboard
• WhatsApp order confirmations, sent by the database rather than the browser
• Delivery, returns and refund flows that match what you actually do

The payment-gateway account is opened in your name, so the money goes to your bank directly and never passes through us. We do not take a percentage of your sales.

From the second year, a website is ₹5,000 a year and an online store is ₹10,000 a year. That keeps hosting, backups, security updates and support running. Your domain and your files stay yours either way.

Two costs never go through us, and it is worth knowing both before you compare quotes:

• Your domain name, roughly ₹800 to ₹1,500 a year, registered in your name so nobody can hold it for you
• Payment-gateway charges on a store, about 2% per order, charged by the gateway and not by us

We are not registered for GST, which is lawful below the threshold, so no tax is added on top of either price. The figure you are quoted is the whole figure.

A website usually takes 2 to 3 weeks and an online store 4 to 6 weeks, counted from the day we have your content: the text, the logo and the photographs, and for a store the product list and the delivery rules.

In practice the wait is almost always content, not code. Gathering it before the build starts is the fastest way to launch.

Anything with accounts in it is a different job: a customer or student portal, a booking system, an assessment platform, a mobile app, document automation or custom software. Those depend too much on your situation for a number to mean anything before we have looked.

Tell us what it has to do, and after one call you get one fixed price, agreed before anything starts.

Whoever you hire, these questions turn a quote into something you can compare:

• Whose name is the domain registered in? It should be yours.
• What does the second year cost, and what exactly does it cover?
• Can I change text, pictures and prices myself, or do I call you every time?
• Where is the site hosted, and how often is it backed up?
• If the business grows into a store, what changes and what does it cost?
• Is GST included in the price, or added on top?

We answer every one of them in writing, on our pages and in the quotation.