What a website really costs in 2026
You ask for a quote and get three thousand euros. You search online and get promised a free site in ten minutes. Between the two, nothing. You cannot tell what is normal, what you pay once, what comes back every month, or what you are being overcharged for.
A brochure site you build yourself costs ten to fifteen euros a year for the domain name, nothing for hosting in most cases, and the rest depends on two choices: a professional email address and an AI subscription. The heaviest line is still your time.
Why the figures you find everywhere are useless
Search “how much does a website cost” and you will get ranges from zero to fifteen thousand euros. Both are true, and neither helps you.
The reason is simple: those figures mix two unrelated things. The cost of the tools — what you pay suppliers, every year, for your site to exist. And the cost of the work — what it costs to have someone design, write and set it up.
An agency quote is almost entirely work. A site you build yourself is almost entirely tools. Comparing the two totals is like comparing the price of a car with the price of a tank of fuel.
What follows prices the tools only, line by line, with the source and the date it was read. The work comes at the end.
Line 1 — the domain name: ten to fifteen euros a year
This is your address, and the only genuinely compulsory line.
The price depends mostly on the extension. A .com or a .fr sits around ten euros a year at a provider that takes no margin — some registrars state explicitly that they do not mark up domain prices at all and bill only what the registry and ICANN charge.
Two very real traps on this line. The discounted first year at one or two euros, which renews at a far higher price: always look at the renewal price, never the headline. And the options added to the basket by default, which you generally do not need.
It is also the line you should never economise on, for a reason that has nothing to do with money: it is the only piece of your site that follows you everywhere.
Line 2 — hosting: zero in most cases
This is the line that changed the most, and almost nobody has taken it in.
For a brochure site — pages, images, text — several free plans serve your pages with no request limit. That is not a trial or a starter offer: it is normal operation, and the documentation of at least one such service states that requests to static files are free and unlimited.
The free ride ends when your site starts running processes: a form writing to a database, a client area, a payment. Thresholds then appear — on the order of a hundred thousand requests a day at the service cited, which a beginner site never reaches.
Put simply: while your site shows things, it is free. When it calculates, it is negotiable.
Line 3 — the professional email address: the choice people see
This line is optional, and it is the one that most changes how serious you look.
Writing from [email protected] rather than a generic free address changes nothing technically, and a great deal for the person receiving it. Budget around eight euros a month per user at the well-known providers.
There is a middle option many people miss: forwarding. An address on your own domain redirects to your usual inbox, often free at your registrar. You receive under your own name and reply from your inbox. Not sufficient forever, entirely sufficient to start.
Line 4 — the AI subscription: around twenty dollars a month
If you build with an AI, this is your largest line: around twenty dollars a month for the paid entry plans, at both major providers, as I write.
Two honest remarks. That subscription is not a site cost, it is a tool cost: it serves you for other things too, and it stops when the site is finished. And the entry plan is enough for the vast majority of beginners — the tier above adds no features, only quantity, as detailed in which plan to pick when you do not code.
Line 5 — the one nobody counts
Time.
A simple brochure site takes a few evenings for someone starting out. It is not an outgoing, so nobody puts it in the budget — and yet it is by far the heaviest of the five lines.
It deserves counting for a practical reason: it decides whether doing it yourself is a good deal. If your evenings are scarce and your business is already running, paying someone can be rational. If you are starting and time is what you have most of, doing it yourself is unbeatable — which is what building with AI versus hiring an agency compares.
And that time is not spread evenly: most of it goes into the round trips, not the building.
The total, honestly
For a brochure site you build yourself, over a year:
The bare minimum: the domain name alone, around ten euros a year. Free hosting, no dedicated email, no paid AI subscription. That is a real scenario, not a theoretical one.
The common case: the domain, an email address on your own name, and an AI subscription for the two or three months of building. That lands in the range of two to three hundred euros for the first year, then noticeably less after, since the AI subscription stops.
What blows a budget up is never this list. It is a need that steps outside the brochure site — online payments, a client area, a catalogue — bringing its own monthly fees. Knowing that before you start avoids the nasty surprise in month three.
What to check before paying for anything
The renewal price, not the headline price. On domains as on hosting, the first year often lies.
What happens if you stop paying. A site that disappears and a site that stays up are not the same deal.
Where your data is and how to get it out. It costs nothing to check at the start, and a great deal to discover too late.
The figures in this article were read at their official sources on 6 August 2026. They will move. The five-line structure will not.