What a small business website costs in Portugal

The four ranges

Almost everything sold in Portugal lands in one of four places. What separates them is not the page count — it is how much human work goes in.

• €0 to €150 — you build it yourself on Wix or Squarespace. You pay the subscription and your own time. Fine if you have patience and a simple business.
• €300 to €800 — a freelancer setting up a bought theme. Fast, and the result looks like a thousand other businesses. Enough when the site is just a business card.
• €800 to €3,000 — a site designed around your business, with your photos, your words and the things you actually need (bookings, menu, quotes). This is where most of the worthwhile market sits.
• €3,000 and up — an agency with a team. Makes sense with a real online shop, integrations with your management software, or many languages and many products.

If someone gives you a number without asking anything about your business, that is not a quote — it is a price list.

What actually pushes the price up

Four things, in order of weight. None of them is the number of pages, which is what everyone asks about first.

• Content. Good photos and written copy save hours. Without them, someone has to produce them — and professional photography is a separate service, not something bundled into a website.
• Features. A contact page is an afternoon. Bookings with email confirmation, payments, or a customer area are projects in their own right.
• Languages. Every extra language is more content to write, review and keep up to date when your prices change.
• Integrations. Connecting the site to your POS, your booking system or your invoicing is where time disappears, because it depends on software that is neither yours nor mine.

The costs nobody puts in the quote

The price of the site is one payment. Having a site is a small but real ongoing cost. Add these up before deciding.

• Domain: €10 to €40 a year, depending on the extension (.pt tends to cost more than .com).
• Hosting: free to €30/month. A normal local business site fits comfortably in the cheap tiers.
• Email on your own domain: €5 to €7 per mailbox per month. Optional, but a gmail address on a business card is noticed.
• Changes: opening hours, prices, new photos. Either you pay by the hour, or you have a monthly plan, or you can edit it yourself — and that third option saves the most money over time.

How to compare three quotes that look nothing alike

Ask everyone the same five questions. The answers explain the price gap better than any PDF proposal.

• Is the domain registered in my name? (If the answer takes a while, that is a bad sign.)
• Can I change hours and prices myself, or do I have to call you?
• How many rounds of changes are included, and what does the next one cost?
• If I leave in a year, do I take the site with me or am I left with nothing?
• Are the photos mine, yours, or from a stock library?

The €800 to €3,000 range is what I do — and you see a demo of your site before you decide.See how it works