What kind of site

Think of two French sites you know. A restaurant's site shows its menu, its opening hours and a booking form. SNCF Connect lets millions of people log in, pay, change their tickets and keep them on their phone. Both are websites. The first takes days to build. The second took years and large teams.

Web projects come in sizes that differ by ten times or more. What sets the size is what the site has to do, not how many pages it has. Pages that only show information, even beautiful ones, take days. A site like this is called a showcase site.

Four things each turn days into weeks:

• Accounts and a login, with password resets and rules about who sees what.
• Personal data to protect, such as customers' addresses or orders.
• Payments, with refunds, receipts and terms of sale.
• Connections to the company's other software, such as its stock, orders or invoicing. Such a connection is called an integration.

Each of them must be built, tested and looked after for years, and together they multiply the cost. A one-page site and a customer area are both websites, in the same way that a garden shed and a house are both buildings.

You've joined the strategy team of a company that makes professional kitchen equipment. Your director asks you to fill in one line of next year's budget, for a web project. A colleague suggests €5,000, "like the last website". Don't copy the last figure. First ask what the site has to do.

To turn time into money, use the day rate: the price of one day of a person's work. In France, an agency or an experienced freelancer often charges between €400 and €800 a day. So a week of work costs a few thousand euros, and three months cost tens of thousands. These figures are rough, but they show whether €5,000 is the right scale.

• A page that presents a new oven, with a form to sign up for its launch event: a few days of work. €5,000 is enough, and probably more than enough.
• A customer area where restaurants log in and download their invoices from the order system: accounts, business data and an integration. That's several weeks to a few months, usually tens of thousands of euros. €5,000 is several times too small.
• An online shop for the public: on a ready-made platform such as Shopify, a few weeks and a few thousand euros, then a monthly fee and a share of each sale. Built from scratch, it's months of work and tens of thousands of euros.

Write a range rather than one number. Add the running costs, because the site will cost money every year after launch. For a shop, count the work outside the site too: product photos and texts, terms of sale, deliveries, returns and customer service.

AI agents write code faster, but they don't change the scale. Accounts, payments and personal data still have to be designed, tested and looked after.

You're an intern in a garden furniture maker's marketing team. Your manager, Nadia, has two quotes for the new website: €9,000 and €24,000. She prefers the cheaper one, but wants your opinion. Before you give it, compare the quotes line by line.

A quote's price follows the work in it. A few pieces of work raise the price more than anything else. They are the price drivers: connections to other software, accessibility, moving content from an old site, accounts and payments, several languages, personal data, and rounds of design changes. When one quote includes such a piece and the other doesn't, the cheaper agency hasn't found a smarter way to do it. It has left the work out, or left it to you. So ask what that piece would cost the company if it's missing.

• Orders typed by hand: at 40 orders a day and a few minutes each, someone spends two to three hours a day typing them in. That's hundreds of hours a year, plus typing mistakes. It soon costs more than the €15,000 difference. First check that the stock software can be connected at all: it needs an API, a way for other software to talk to it.
• Accessibility left out: a company of 120 people that sells to the public online must follow the European Accessibility Act, which has applied since June 2025. Fixing a finished site costs much more than building it right.
• Content left to the client: moving 3,500 articles and product pages at ten minutes each takes about 600 hours, several months of one person's time. The old addresses must also lead to the new pages, through redirects, or the site loses its place in search results. Ask whether all of it is worth moving.

Recommend the quote that does what the company needs, or ask the cheaper agency to price the same scope. And ask every agency for an itemised quote, so you compare the same work.

The example below shows the two quotes for the first case. Most lines are almost the same. One line makes the difference: the connection to the stock and invoicing software. In the cheaper quote, it's "not included", and each new order arrives by email, for someone to type in.

You're the product owner of the new website for a chain of twelve bakeries: the person who decides what the site must do. The launch is in three weeks, and the agency is on time and on budget. This morning the sales director comes to your desk: "Could we just add one small thing before launch? It should only take a day or two."

Size the request before you answer. The test is simple. Does it add something to pages that already exist, or does it add a new kind of thing? A link, a button, a paragraph or a photo is hours of work. Accounts, personal data, a connection to another system or a second platform each bring weeks of work, and costs that continue after launch.

• A button to share each recipe on WhatsApp: small, so you can say yes. Ask for a plain share link, not a social network's script, which would track visitors and need their consent.
• A loyalty card with points: customer accounts, data about what each customer buys, rules for points, and a connection to the tills in twelve shops. That's weeks to months.
• A mobile app as well: a second product, for two platforms, checked by Apple's and Google's stores before each version, and updated whenever iOS or Android changes. That's weeks to months, then a yearly cost. Often, a site that works well on phones already does what customers need.

Three weeks before launch, protect the date. Say yes to what is really small, and move the rest to a next phase, with its own estimate and budget. Being on budget doesn't mean there's money to spare: the budget pays for the work that was agreed.

Before you size any request, ask what problem it solves. Write every change down with its price and its delay, even the small ones, because a dozen small things together can delay the launch. And remember that each addition must be maintained for years.

In class, you estimate the first version of your own portfolio, then compare your figure with a real quote.

Start from what the site must do, not from its pages. A portfolio shows your projects, your CV and a way to contact you. That's a showcase site with one simple form, so it takes a freelancer a few days. At €400 to €800 a day, your range is one to a few thousand euros. If a real quote is far from your range, look for the difference in the work it includes.

Then take each option you had in mind, and ask whether it changes the kind of site. A dark mode or a filter on the projects adds hours or days. An English version doubles the texts to write and check. A blog with comments needs someone to read the comments, or accounts. A shop for your photos needs payments and terms of sale. A private area for recruiters needs logins. Each of these turns days into weeks.

When the honest figure is too high, propose a smaller first step rather than a smaller budget for the same thing: a version that does less, does it well, and shows whether the bigger one is worth it. Keep the rest in the roadmap. In this course, an AI agent builds your first version. It writes the code fast, but the decisions, the content and the checks are still yours.

Ask these questions before you write a figure in a budget, and before you choose between two quotes.

Before you fix a figure, ask for the list of what the site must do, and who will use it. Does it need accounts, personal data, payments, or connections to other software? Each yes adds weeks. Then write a range, add the yearly running costs on top of the build, and count the work outside the site.

When you compare quotes, ask each agency for an itemised quote. Look for the line that makes the difference, and ask what's behind it before you cut it. If one quote leaves a piece out, ask that agency to price it, so that both quotes describe the same project. Sometimes the right answer is to drop the feature, not to choose the agency that left it out.

When someone asks for "one small thing", ask what problem it solves, and whether it adds to pages that exist or adds a new kind of thing. Ask what it costs in money, in time and in maintenance. Then decide: now, or in a next phase.