What a $5k website actually buys you (and what it doesn't)
Pricing transparency in web development is rare. Here's where a real budget goes, and the corners we refuse to cut.
By Quais Afzali, founder of OnQ Development
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, but it hasn't changed where the remaining money goes:
Discovery, a small share. Understanding the audience, the offer, and the conversion path. Skipping this is how most "redesigns" land worse than what they replaced.
Design, a large share. A real design system: type scale, color tokens, components, and states.
Engineering, the largest share. Production code: SSR, accessibility, performance budgets, schema markup, analytics, CI/CD.
Launch and iteration, a small share. 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.