What a website costs in the USA, and what it costs built in India

Clutch’s web design pricing guide, updated on 21 September 2026, puts agency work between $2,000 and $100,000, with an average project cost of $38,105.39 over about seven months. Shortlisted firms in the United States charge $100 to $149 an hour. Most projects reviewed on Clutch still come in under $10,000, which tells you how much of that market is small sites quoted tight.

The hourly rate is not padding. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median wage for web developers and digital designers at $99,520 a year as of May 2025. Add a designer, a project manager, payroll tax, health cover, an office and the cost of winning the work, and $100 an hour is close to what an American agency has to charge to stay open.

So a $18,000 quote is usually 120 to 180 hours of real work. The question is not whether those hours exist. It is whether you want to pay $120 an hour for them when the same hours are available at a quarter of that.

A basic marketing site is $1,450. A B2B site with service pages, case pages and a working enquiry form is $2,600. A corporate site with multiple locations, leadership pages and a careers section is $3,300. Ecommerce is $3,700. Hosting and maintenance start at $300 a month. There is no GST on a US invoice.

Those prices are for finished work, not a theme install. They cover design, build, content layout, on-page SEO, schema, analytics, a staging link you can see every week, and the launch. The detail of what sits in each tier is on our website development page, and our US engagement terms sit on the USA services page.

If you want the monthly search work alongside the build, our US SEO plans run $750 a month for Starter, $1,100 for Growth, $1,850 for Scale and $2,950 for a resource-based team of two specialists. Paid media management is the higher of 15% of monthly media or $750, and the rate on the whole budget drops to 10% from $20,000 of media, 8% from $50,000 and 4% from $100,000.

The clock changes. Our working overlap with the US east coast is 8:00 am to 12:00 noon Miami time, which is 5:30 pm to 9:30 pm in India in US summer and 6:30 pm to 10:30 pm in winter. You get four hours a weekday for calls and decisions, and the rest of the build happens while you sleep. A Tuesday afternoon comment is usually answered by Wednesday morning.

The briefing changes. You cannot drop into a studio and point at a screen, so the brief has to be written and the feedback has to be specific. “Make the hero stronger” costs a round. “Replace the hero line with our claim about 1999 and move the phone number above the fold” does not.

The number of rounds you can afford changes, and that is the part most buyers miss. Clutch’s own location table puts India and the Philippines under $25 an hour against $100 to $149 in the United States. At our price a second design direction is a decision, not a change order.

The platform does not change. WordPress ran 40.1% of all websites and 58.6% of the known CMS market on 11 October 2026, according to W3Techs, and a WordPress install built in Noida is the same software a Chicago agency would hand you. Your developer in Miami can open it tomorrow.

The technical bar does not change either. Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds are the same wherever the code is written: largest contentful paint of 2.5 seconds or less, interaction to next paint of 200 milliseconds, cumulative layout shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile. We build to those numbers and show you the report before launch.

Nor does the hosting decision. We put US sites on US data centres with a CDN in front, because your buyer is in Tampa, not Noida, and a 200 millisecond round trip is a 200 millisecond round trip.

Ask for three live URLs, not screenshots. Run each one through Google’s PageSpeed Insights yourself and look at the field data, not the lab score. If a two-year-old site from the same team still passes the three Core Web Vitals thresholds, the build was done properly and has been looked after since.

Then ask who writes the words. A lot of cheap work is a good-looking shell with copy nobody owns, which is why the pages read the same across four different companies. Ask for the staging link of a current project, read three paragraphs, and decide whether a person wrote them.

Last, ask what happens in month 13. Who renews the domain, who patches the plugins, who is called when the contact form stops posting. Our answer is the maintenance plan at $300 a month, and the web design page sets out what sits inside it.

Two to three weeks for a basic site. Four to five weeks for a B2B site. Six to eight weeks for a corporate site. Eight to ten weeks for ecommerce with 100 to 300 products. Those are our own numbers from the last three years of US and India builds, and they assume you give us the content and the approvals on time.

Almost nothing slips because of code. It slips because the leadership photographs are not taken, because legal has not cleared the claim on the home page, or because the one person who knows the product specification is travelling. Collect those before the build starts and you will keep the timeline.

We publish a staging link in week one and keep it current, so an approval is a comment on a real page rather than a meeting about a mockup.

You do, and it should be in writing before the first invoice. The domain stays in a registrar account in your company’s name. Hosting sits in your name, or in an account that can be transferred to you in a day. The WordPress files and database are yours, with no licence fee to us and no builder lock that stops another team editing a page.

Analytics is where most companies lose control without noticing. Create the Google Analytics 4 property and the Search Console property under a company Google account, then add the agency as a user. If an agency created those for you under its own login, ask for ownership to move this week.

The same rule applies to ad accounts, the Google Business Profile and the Meta assets. A business manager owned by you, with us as a partner, survives a change of agency. One owned by us does not.

One call a week inside the overlap window, a written note after it, and a staging link that is always current. Comments go in one place. We work through them in India hours and you see the result the next morning. Over a six-week corporate build that is five calls, not thirty emails.

Florida clients get the same cadence with a local accent to the work, because the search terms and the review flow differ by city. That is the job described on our Miami page, and the build and the search work are quoted separately so you can start with one.

If you already have a site and only one part of it is broken, say that when you write in. Rebuilding pages that already rank is money you do not need to spend, and we would rather fix the three templates that are costing you enquiries.