How to budget for a professional website in Brussels

For a sense of scale: at KRUZ, a brochure site starts from €479, a larger or multilingual site from €849, and an online shop from €1,759. These are starting points rather than fixed packages: the final price depends on the scope described below, and bespoke projects are quoted case by case. The figures cover delivery of the site itself, not hosting or the domain name.

Budget depends on the problem the site must solve, the content it needs and the systems it must connect to. Two projects with the same page count can require very different work when one includes several languages, a catalogue or a URL migration.

Before asking for a figure, prepare a short brief covering objectives, audiences, priority journeys, available content, languages, features and responsibilities. A supplier can then explain its assumptions and separate included work from options.

A clear proposal separates discovery, information architecture, design, responsive development, content integration, technical SEO foundations, testing and launch. It also states how many page templates and review rounds are included.

Check the tangible deliverables: files or components, access to the domain and hosting, documentation, any training and the terms of support. A single line for a “complete website” is not enough to compare offers or anticipate additions.

Page count is only one factor. Copywriting, photography, illustration, animation, accessibility, multilingual content, an editing interface or booking functionality can all alter the work involved.

Agree which tasks your team will own. Supplying approved copy and properly licensed media can reduce production work, although time is still needed to adapt material for screens and check it as a coherent whole.

An online store is more than a catalogue and checkout button. Product variants, stock, tax, delivery, returns, customer accounts, invoicing, transactional email and links to point-of-sale or accounting systems all need definition.

• Product count alone is therefore a poor estimate.
• Data quality, business rules and integrations can matter more.
• Platform subscriptions, extensions, payment services and other third parties should appear separately in the total cost of ownership.

A redesign introduces work that a new site does not: inventorying URLs, deciding what content to keep, planning redirects, migrating data and validating analytics. The condition of the current site affects the effort.

Ask for a focused content, technical and journey audit before fixing scope. It helps distinguish between incremental improvement, a new interface and a deeper rebuild.

First case: a Brussels tradesperson wants a five-page site in French, with contact details, services, a few photographs and a contact form. The copy already exists and the photographs were taken by a friend. The work is to structure, design, build, integrate and launch. That project matches KRUZ’s starting point of €479, and it is done in a few weeks if approvals keep pace.

Second case: the same tradesperson also wants a Dutch version, one page per service with examples of work, and online appointment booking linked to their calendar. The number of templates grows, translation enters the scope and a third-party integration must be tested. The starting point moves to €849, and the proposal states what translation costs if it is not supplied.

Third case: a retailer wants to sell around a hundred products with size variants online, with delivery in Belgium through Bpost, payment by Bancontact and card, and automatic invoicing. The catalogue must be prepared, delivery and VAT rules defined, the payment module configured and the checkout tested end to end. The starting point is €1,759, plus platform and payment fees that never pass through the supplier.

Copywriting. A site without text does not exist, and “the client supplies the copy” is the most underestimated line in any project. Writing a clear service page takes time, even for someone who knows their trade by heart. Ask whether proofreading, restructuring or full writing is included, and at what rate it can be.

• Visuals.
• Stock photographs are recognised instantly and weaken trust; unedited phone photographs do worse.
• Half a day with a professional photographer transforms a site, but it must be budgeted.
• The same goes for a logo that only exists as a small pixelated file: vectorising it is a separate item.

Legal texts. Legal notice, privacy policy, terms of sale for a shop, a consent banner for non-essential cookies: these texts cannot be improvised or copied from a competitor. A serious supplier provides a structure and flags what a legal adviser must validate, without standing in for one.

A .be domain renews every year for a modest amount at any registrar accredited by DNS Belgium. Hosting a well-built static site can be free or cost a few euros a month on a modern hosting platform; a WordPress site needs managed hosting, generally billed between ten and forty euros a month depending on the service level.

Business email is a separate item: an address on the domain name with an email provider costs a few euros a month per mailbox. It is not part of the site, but it is essential and often forgotten until the day before launch.

For a shop, add the platform subscription if there is one, payment fees — a percentage per transaction plus a fixed amount, varying by payment method — and any paid modules for delivery, invoicing or reviews. These amounts depend on volume and belong in an annual simulation, not in the build proposal.

A maintenance contract normally covers security updates, backups, uptime monitoring and a monthly allowance for small changes. It does not cover creating new pages, reworking a template or adding a feature, which are priced separately.

• The need varies enormously with the technology.
• A static site has almost nothing to update; maintenance amounts to checking that everything works and intervening on request.
• A CMS site with extensions needs regular updates, each of which can break another, and a monthly contract becomes reasonable insurance.

Ask what happens without a contract: does the site keep working, who intervenes in the event of a failure, and how quickly? A supplier who answers those three questions clearly leaves you free to choose; one who dodges them is selling maintenance as dependency.

The best lever is not a discount, it is scope. Reducing a first release to what is essential — the pages that answer customers’ questions, a reliable contact route, a clean technical base — costs less and ships sooner. Team pages, a blog and animations come later, once the site has proved its usefulness.

The second lever is preparation. A client who arrives with approved copy, sorted photographs, access to the domain and a single decision-maker saves hours of coordination the proposal does not have to absorb. State what you bring and ask for it to be reflected in the price.

Be wary, on the other hand, of savings that merely move the cost: a cheap theme with twenty extensions, saturated shared hosting or a free contact form that sends enquiries to spam end up costing lost time, missed customers and an early redesign. The lowest price at launch is not always the lowest total cost.

Put initial delivery, hosting, domain, licences, maintenance, backups, support and future content production on one sheet. For every item, note who pays, who administers it and what may change the charge.

Compare method and exclusions as well as the total. A sound proposal states what counts as a scope change and how additional work will be agreed before it begins.