What a $5k website actually buys you (and what it doesn't)
Pricing transparency in web development is rare. Here's an honest breakdown of where a real budget goes — and the corners we refuse to cut.
A $5k engagement is not a luxury — it's the realistic floor for a custom site that meaningfully outperforms a templated one. AI-assisted development has pushed delivery costs down dramatically; what it hasn't changed is where the remaining money goes:
Discovery (10–15%). Understanding the audience, the offer, and the conversion path. Skipping this is how most "redesigns" land worse than what they replaced.
Design (25–30%). A real design system: type scale, color tokens, components, states. Not a single Figma artboard.
Engineering (40–50%). Production code: SSR, accessibility, performance budgets, schema markup, analytics, CI/CD.
Launch & iteration (10–15%). Migration, redirects, monitoring, and the first round of post-launch tuning informed by real traffic.
What it doesn't buy: an enterprise CMS migration, a marketing engine you don't have to operate, or unlimited revisions. Those are different engagements with different budgets — and we'll tell you so up front.