What a website actually costs in Pakistan

Four different questions, not one. A brochure site for a small business, a WordPress shop, a custom web application and a SaaS product are four different things to build, and a single range covering all of them tells you nothing useful.

Everything below describes the local market: work done by a Pakistani team for a client in Pakistan. Agencies here that bill export clients in dollars run to a different cost structure entirely, so none of this transfers cleanly if you are reading from outside the country.

These are the ranges we see quoted around Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, not a price list. Nobody can quote your project from a blog post, and any agency that does has not read your requirements. Treat them as a way to tell a serious quote from a fantasy, then ask for a real one.

Complexity is what moves you inside a band, and it moves you a long way. The most involved work we take on lands around four to five lakh, and the difference between that and the bottom of the same band is almost never "more pages". It is roles, money, integrations and edge cases.

Figure 1: Complete step-by-step architectural workflow and technical execution stages for What a website actually costs in Pakistan.

A brochure site

Five to ten pages that explain who you are: home, services, about, contact, sometimes a blog or a gallery. Nobody logs in, nothing is calculated. The job of the site is to look credible, load quickly, and put your phone number in front of someone who just searched for what you do.

Most of the spread here is design, not code. A bought theme dressed in your colours, logo and photographs sits at the bottom of the band. A layout drawn for you specifically sits at the top, and the difference in effort is mostly rounds of feedback rather than extra engineering.

WordPress with WooCommerce

The same site plus a shop: product catalogue, cart, checkout, a payment gateway, order emails, shipping rules and stock counts.

WooCommerce itself is free and installing it takes an afternoon, which is why quotes for stores vary so wildly. The money goes elsewhere: into product data (a hundred products with sizes and colours is a hundred small decisions someone has to make), into shipping rules that match how you actually deliver, and into the payment gateway, which is paperwork with a bank or a local processor rather than a coding problem. Start that paperwork early. It is the most common reason a finished store sits unlaunched. If you want to understand the thing you are buying, our free WordPress course covers the same stack.

A custom web application

People log in. There are roles, records, permissions and a dashboard somebody checks on Monday morning. A school portal, a booking system, an inventory tool, an internal CRM. This is written as code rather than assembled from plugins, because the logic belongs to your business and no plugin knows it. It is also most of what we build.

Quotes diverge most here, and the specification does all the work. "Staff can manage bookings" is not a specification. Who can cancel, what happens to the money when they do, who gets notified, and what the report at the end of the month has to contain: those answers are the actual project, and an agency that does not ask them is not going to hold its price.

A SaaS MVP

The application above, except strangers pay for it monthly. That adds sign up, plans, billing, cancellation, onboarding for people you will never speak to, and enough finish that someone who has never met you will trust it with a card.

The unflattering note: most people who ask for a SaaS MVP are describing version three. The cheapest useful first version is one workflow done properly for a handful of paying users, and cutting scope down to that will save you more than any discount you can negotiate. If you would rather build it yourself first, the full stack course is free and covers the same ground we would.

What moves a project inside its band

Integrations deserve a separate warning, because anything that talks to someone else's system is priced by their rules and their timeline, not ours. A payment gateway needs a merchant account and a compliance review that moves at the bank's pace. Automated WhatsApp messaging runs on Meta's business platform, which requires a verified business, message templates approved in advance, and per message charges set by Meta. Instagram automation works differently again: no templates and no per message fee, but you can generally only reply inside a window that opens when the customer messages you first. Meta has changed both the message categories and the pricing model more than once, so read their current documentation before you budget for either platform rather than trusting a number in any blog post, this one included. We build on both ourselves (Your Bot is our own product) and we still re-check the policy on every project.

What is always extra

Ask explicitly which of these are inside the quote, because often they are not:

• A domain, renewed every year, forever
• Hosting, on a plan that matches your traffic rather than the cheapest shared box available (paired with Cloudflare for SSL and DDoS mitigation)
• Email on your own domain, which is a separate service from hosting
• Renewals for any paid theme or plugin, since the licence usually buys one year of updates
• Content: writing, photography, product images, translation
• Maintenance: updates, backups, uptime monitoring, the security patch that lands on a Sunday

A site with no maintenance arrangement is not cheaper, it is deferred cost. This is sharper on WordPress than anywhere else, because a WordPress site is a stack of plugins that update on their own schedule, and installs that nobody updates are exactly the ones that get compromised.

What a suspiciously cheap quote usually leaves out

Not every low quote is a trap. Sometimes it is a genuinely fast freelancer with low overheads, or a student building a portfolio, and on a five page site that can be a perfectly good deal. The problem is that the number alone does not tell you which one you have. These are the omissions that turn the good version into the bad one:

• Nulled themes and plugins. Pirated commercial software, so no updates, no support, and occasionally injected code you did not ask for. It is the most common route from a cheap site to an expensive incident.
• The code is not yours. You paid for a website and received access to one. Ask before the work starts, not when you want to leave.
• The domain and hosting are in the developer's name. Moving away is now a negotiation instead of a decision.
• Revisions are unlimited until they are not. Unlimited usually means unlimited for a week, or unlimited on small things.
• No handover. No admin login, no documentation, no accounts in your name, and nobody but them who can change your own website.
• The demo import. A theme's sample content with your logo dropped on top. It photographs well and says nothing about your business.

Questions to ask any agency, us included

If any answer is vague, make it the ownership one you push on. Almost everything else can be fixed later.

Where we would tell you not to hire us

For a straightforward brochure site with no logic in it, a good freelancer will usually beat any agency on price, ours included, because we carry overheads a freelancer does not: a registered company, contracts, and a team where people cover for each other. That is worth paying for when the thing has to keep running for years and someone has to answer the phone when it breaks. It is not obviously worth paying for on a five page site you expect to replace anyway.

And when WordPress is the right answer, we will say WordPress, even though a custom build is a larger invoice for us. Rebuilding a shop from scratch to avoid WooCommerce is a way to spend money, not a way to save it.

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If you want a number, tell us what the site has to do and we will scope it properly.