What a custom website actually costs: Western Europe compared with Slovakia

The short answer

Two quotes for the same website can differ several times over because the hourly rate differs, not the amount of work. On the published numbers below, a business website at a German or Dutch agency is typically two to three times our price for a comparable scope, and more at the top of their ranges. It is not the five to one gap that nearshore marketing likes to quote.

Our export price for a custom website starts at from 3,900 €, which is 50 hours at our export rate of 75 € an hour. Pricing shows the hours, so you can check the arithmetic.

One thing most comparisons of this kind leave out, and we would rather say it first: in every Western market there is also a freelancer tier. Several of the sources below price a local freelancer at roughly 500 to 5 000 EUR for a small business site, which is our range, not a multiple of it. The comparison that follows is agency against agency. If your alternative is a good local freelancer, the price argument largely disappears and you should choose on other grounds.

Published rates and prices, market by market

A warning about what this evidence is. Almost all of it comes from suppliers' and marketplaces' own pricing guides, which have a commercial interest in anchoring local prices high. It is the only price data that exists in this market, and we use it, but read it as asking prices rather than as a survey. Conversions use European Central Bank reference rates of 5 October 2026; Swiss figures are left in francs.

We have deliberately left the Slovakia row to our own published numbers. An earlier version of this article quoted a 40 to 70 EUR band for „this part of Europe“; the source for it named Poland, Romania and Ukraine and never mentioned Slovakia, so it is gone.

What actually drives the price

Hours multiplied by a rate

A website price is an estimate of hours multiplied by a rate, plus margin and a risk buffer. Two suppliers who both read your site as 120 hours of work will quote 10 800 EUR and 4 800 EUR if one bills 90 EUR and the other 40 EUR. Comparing two quotes often means comparing two rates and calling it a comparison of quality.

The rate is mostly a function of location

The structural part of any rate is what an hour of work costs the employer. Eurostat puts the 2025 employer labour cost per hour in information and communication at 30,8 EUR in Slovakia against 58,5 EUR in Germany, 61,6 EUR in Austria, 62,5 EUR in Sweden, 63,5 EUR in Denmark and 71,7 EUR in Ireland, with an EU average of 48,2 EUR. For 2024 the same series gives the Netherlands 58.0 EUR against Slovakia 28.8 EUR. Across industry and services excluding public administration, Slovakia was at 19.8 EUR an hour in 2025 and Germany at 45.0 EUR.

The labour cost data says nothing about skill in either direction. It measures rent, salaries, payroll taxes and the cost of living where the laptop is open.

Four different numbers get published as „the rate“

Be careful with any article that gives you a single nearshore rate. At least four figures circulate under that label: employer labour cost, developer take-home pay, freelance asking rates and what a vendor actually bills. One analysis found Poland published at 29,30 EUR, 45 to 70 USD, 50 to 99 USD, 65 to 90 USD and 47 to 93 EUR an hour by five sources in one year. Apply that scepticism to our numbers too: ask for a quote, not a range.

Elapsed time is a cost line of its own

If a cheaper supplier takes three months longer, the saving on the rate disappears into three more months of your team's attention and three more months of a site that is not earning. Ask for a date, not just a price.

A number you will see quoted here deserves a label rather than a headline: Clutch reports an average web development project of 66 499 USD over about nine months, and web design projects averaging 38 105 USD over seven months. Those are averages across every project size on the platform, on a page that elsewhere says typical projects cost under 10 000 USD. Use them as a ceiling, not as a benchmark for a small business site.

What you do not save on by going nearshore

You save on the rate. You do not save on any of the following, and a quote that implies otherwise is incomplete.

• Your own people's time. Discovery, decisions, approvals and feedback are your hours, and they do not get cheaper. The usual failure in outsourcing is governance rather than the rate: an unclear scope, no acceptance criteria and no maintenance agreement will cost more than a higher hourly rate ever will.
• Content, photography and translation. German copy still needs someone who writes German.
• Third-party costs. Hosting, licences and payment gateway fees cost the same wherever the code is written.
• Maintenance. The second year is not free. The usual planning figure is 15 to 25 % of the build cost per year, and where that number comes from and how to read it we set out in our article What a native iOS app costs.
• Testing discipline. Whether the supplier tests is a question of its own and it needs asking. The figure usually cited for it, and its limitations, are in our article How to vet a development partner.
• Scope risk. Unmanaged scope will cost you more than any higher hourly rate. The classic study on cost overruns, and why it does not transfer directly to a small business website, we cover in that same article.

What we charge, plainly

Our export prices are a custom website from from 3,900 €, with a content management system from from 5,900 €, an online shop from 6,900 €+, a portal or web application from 14,900 €+ and a native iOS app from 13,500 €+. Add-on work is 75 € an hour, 90 € for native app work. Every one of those figures is hours times the rate, and the price list

Three things are written into our terms and conditionsrather than promised in a sales call. Once the price is paid in full you receive the source code and access to the repository. The warranty is 12 months for clients based outside Slovakia and Czechia, six months otherwise. And the change rule runs in both directions: if the actual scope is smaller than the quote assumed, we charge less without being asked, and we raise the price only if you expand the scope or we have to produce materials you did not supply, in both cases only after you agree in writing.

On VAT, the honest version rather than the sales version. We do not add VAT to our invoices. If you are a VAT registered business in the EU, your accountant will account for our invoice under the reverse charge in the normal way, and you would have deducted the VAT on a domestic supplier's invoice anyway, so this is not a saving to you. Compare net figures against net figures. It is a real difference only for a buyer who cannot deduct VAT, or for a buyer outside the EU.

Every design is made for a specific project; we do not resell templates. What the difference in market rates between those two kinds of work is, and why it decides quotes, we cover in our article Why we do not build on templates.

Limitations: what is harder with a supplier in Slovakia

Three things get harder, and you should price them in.

The clock. We work in Central European Time, UTC+1 in winter and UTC+2 in summer. Against London that is one hour, so a nine to five day overlaps for about seven hours. Against New York it is six hours, leaving roughly two hours of overlap, or three if we work until 18:00. Against San Francisco it is nine hours and there is effectively no overlap unless somebody shifts their day. If your project needs live West Coast decisions every afternoon, we are the wrong supplier.

Our size. We are a small studio. There is no 24/7 support line and no bench to swap in if you need twenty people next quarter.

Written English beats spoken English. Slovakia ranks 10 of 123 countries in the EF English Proficiency Index 2025 with a score of 606. The sub-scores show where the strength is: reading 621 and listening 608 against writing 559 and speaking 505. Written specifications, code review and asynchronous documentation are safe ground. A day-long workshop held entirely by voice is harder work for everyone.

Two more things. Slovakia does not rank well on the indices buyers sometimes check: 57 of 69 in the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking 2025 and 48 of 139 in the WIPO Global Innovation Index 2026, with ICT services exports at rank 62. One index runs the other way and we will mention it because it is relevant to a GDPR-nervous buyer: the same IMD 2025 ranking puts Slovakia first in the world for legal protection of privacy.

And the cost gap is closing: Eurostat's ICT labour cost series rose 40,0% in Slovakia between 2020 and 2025 and 69,4% in Poland, against 19,4% in Germany. Today's difference is not permanent.

How to compare two quotes fairly

Convert both quotes into hours and a rate before you look at anything else, then put the same seven questions to each supplier.

1. How many hours, at what rate? A supplier who will not break the number down has given you nothing to compare.
2. What is excluded? Content, translation, photography, integrations and data migration are the usual gaps.
3. What is the tax treatment? Compare net against net and check your own position with your accountant, because a VAT line you can deduct is not a cost to you.
4. Who owns the source code and the accounts? Ask in writing, including hosting and domain access, and ask when the licence takes effect.
5. What happens after launch, and at what price? Get maintenance quoted as a number, not as goodwill, and ask how long the warranty runs.
6. How long, and what does waiting cost you? Ask for a date, and ask what moves it.
7. Who exactly does the work? Names and roles, not a headcount claim.

These seven questions test commercial clarity. They do not test code quality, testing discipline, accessibility or security, so do not read a clean set of answers as proof that two quotes are technically equivalent. If both survive and one is still substantially cheaper, you have probably found a rate difference, and the way to confirm it is to look at the work itself: ask each supplier for a live site they built and run it through a free audit.