Three quotes, same website, three very different numbers
If you've ever asked "what does a website cost," you know the problem: you get three quotes for the same project and they land at $4,000, $11,000 and $18,000. None of them is lying. The spread is real — and it's explainable by a handful of variables you can actually pin down.
I've scoped web projects since 2011, and I got tired of the only honest answer being "it depends." It does depend — but on a short list of things. So I turned my estimating logic into a free calculator and published the numbers behind it as an open dataset. Here's what the data says web work costs in 2026, and a little on how the tool works.
The 2026 bands (freelancer pricing, Western-Europe baseline)
- Landing page: $300–$3,000 · 1–3 weeks
- WordPress business site: $1,200–$12,000 · 3–10 weeks
- Shopify store: $2,500–$25,000 · 2–8 weeks
- WooCommerce store: $3,000–$20,000 · 4–10 weeks
- Magento / Adobe Commerce: $15,000–$100,000+ · 8–24 weeks
- Custom web app: $5,000–$120,000+ · 6–20 weeks
The timeline killer is almost never the code. It's content delivery and revision rounds. Pre-write your copy and lock the design in round two and you cut 3–5 weeks off any of these.
Why identical scopes get quotes 4x apart
Three multipliers do most of the damage:
Region. The same spec legitimately prices from about 0.35x (South/SE Asia) to 1.45x (US/Canada) of the Western-Europe baseline. That's a ~4x spread with nobody scamming anyone — it's just where the developer sits.
Freelancer vs agency. An agency quotes roughly 2.2–2.4x a freelancer for the same scope. You're paying for project management, QA and accountability, not different code.
Platform. Shopify is cheap to build and you pay the platform forever; WooCommerce costs a bit more up front and you own hosting; Magento only makes sense with a dev on retainer (~2x WordPress pricing and 1.8x the timeline).
Then smaller ones stack on top: a migration with redirects and content moves adds ~40% over a fresh build; a rush timeline up to +65%.
How the calculator works
Instead of one formula, it runs 9 small engines and composes them: hours estimation, platform multiplier, market rate, pricing tier, risk, complexity, timeline, monthly cost, and a rough ROI read. Each returns a factor or a figure; the orchestrator combines them into a range, a platform recommendation and a timeline. It stores nothing — the estimate is computed client-side and there's no signup or email gate.
Stated accuracy is ±18%, calibrated against 600+ project quotes and public rate benchmarks across 6 markets.
The data is open (CC BY 4.0)
The numbers behind it — base costs, platform/region/tier multipliers, median project costs — are published as an open dataset you can use in your own work:
- JSON endpoint (no auth): https://projectcostestimator.com/api/cost-data
- Hugging Face (versioned): https://huggingface.co/datasets/zimzum1984/software-developer-hourly-rates-2026
- Zenodo (DOI, archived): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21460256
Try it
The calculator is free and needs no account: https://projectcostestimator.com/calculator
Disclosure: I built it. I'd genuinely like to know where the numbers are off for your market or niche — corrections improve the next refresh.
