What to decide before you hire a web agency in India
How to tell a brochure site from an application, what actually drives scope, and the questions that make two proposals comparable — without chasing published rate cards.
Entrovix AIJul 28, 2026 8 min read
Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five answers an order of magnitude apart. That is not because anyone is lying. It is because "a website" describes a brochure with five pages and it describes a booking platform handling payments, and those are not the same job.
Published rate cards rarely help. What does help is being clear about the job the site must do, what belongs in version one, and which questions make two written proposals comparable.
Match the product to the job
| Type of site | What it is for | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Landing page (single page) | One campaign, one action | 3–5 days |
| Business / brochure site (5–12 pages) | Explain the offer and capture enquiries | 2–3 weeks |
| Ecommerce store | Sell products with payments and inventory | 4–8 weeks |
| Custom web application | Staff or customers complete ongoing tasks | 8–20 weeks |
Below a serious custom build you are often buying a template with your logo dropped in. That is a legitimate purchase — it is simply a different product, and it is worth knowing which one you are getting.
What actually expands the scope
Page count matters far less than people expect. Ten pages built from three templates is barely more work than four. What genuinely expands scope is anything with logic behind it.
- Payments. Taking money means handling failures, refunds, reconciliation and compliance. It is never just a button.
- User accounts. Login, password reset, permissions and sessions are a security surface, and security work is slow work done properly.
- Integrations. Every external system — CRM, ERP, courier, accounting — is someone else's API with its own failure modes.
- Custom design. A bespoke interface needs more attention than a themed one and is worth it when your brand is a differentiator.
- Content. Most projects that run late run late on content, not code. Photography and copy take longer than anyone plans for.
- Ongoing work. Hosting, updates, backups and monitoring are a running responsibility. A proposal that omits them has not removed the need, only the mention of it.
Questions that make proposals comparable
- 1Who owns the code, the domain and the hosting when the project ends?
- 2Is the proposal a fixed scope, or an estimate against hourly billing?
- 3How many rounds of revisions are included, and what counts as a revision versus a new request?
- 4Will I be able to edit content myself, or does every text change come back to you?
A cheap site that you cannot update, do not own and cannot extend is not cheap. It is a rebuild scheduled for eighteen months from now.
Where effort is usually wasted
The two most common expensive mistakes are opposite in shape. The first is buying far more than the business needs — a custom application for a company whose real problem is that nobody can find them on Google. The second is buying far less, then rebuilding when the template cannot do what the business needs six months later.
The way through both is to write down the single thing the site must do before asking anyone to scope it. If the answer is "get enquiries from search", the effort belongs in content and speed, not in an elaborate build.
A clearer way to decide
Decide what an enquiry is worth to your business, then judge whether a project would realistically create enough of them. That framing is more useful than comparing published numbers in isolation, because it tells you what kind of site you actually need.
In short
Be clear about the one job the site has to do. Insist on a written proposal that lists scope and ownership. Ask who maintains it after launch. And treat any agency that publishes one-size-fits-all rates for every kind of website with healthy scepticism — the work is not one size.
