A website in Spain can cost a monthly subscription and a weekend of your own time, or five figures and six weeks of somebody else's. Both are honest prices for different things. What separates them is rarely quality alone: it is who does the work, who writes the content, and who owns the result. This page sets out the tiers of the Spanish market, what sits inside each one, what makes a quote climb, and the questions that reveal what you are actually buying.
Why there is no single number
Four variables move the price more than anything else. How much of the design is made for you alone. How much content has to be written from scratch. How many languages. How many other systems the site has to talk to.
A five page site in one language, with your text already written, is a different job from a twelve page site in two languages with a booking engine attached. Both are called “a website”.
Why this page does not quote other suppliers' prices
A published price ages in months, and somebody else's price repeated badly is a problem for everyone involved. What does not age is what sits inside each tier. So that is what we describe, and you can hold any quote you receive against it.
The four tiers of the Spanish market
1. A template you set up yourself
You pay a monthly subscription to a site builder and you do the work: layout, text, photos, legal pages. The invoice is small. The cost is your hours, and they are real hours.
Good for a first site, a single service page, or proving that the business exists. What you give up: the site lives inside the platform. Moving it later usually means rebuilding it.
2. A template someone sets up for you
A freelancer or a small studio installs a bought theme, loads your content and launches. It is the hardest tier to compare, because two quotes at the same price can hide very different amounts of work.
Ask which plugins are keeping the site alive, and who updates them next year.
3. Custom design on a standard CMS
The design is made for you and built on a common CMS. You are buying design hours and content, not the platform. The result looks like your company instead of like a theme.
This is the tier where the maintenance conversation gets postponed. A CMS with a dozen plugins is a system, and a system needs an owner.
4. A custom build
Written as code, on infrastructure you own, with a content model designed around your business. It is the tier where a site can be pre-rendered as static HTML, hardened, made multilingual and made readable by search crawlers and AI assistants without fighting a platform. It is also the tier where you own everything: repository, backend, hosting account, domain.
Our own prices start here, and they are listed further down.
What makes a quote climb
Content. The most underestimated line in any project. Someone has to write the pages, take the photographs and approve the text. If that someone is your supplier, it is in the price. If it is you, it is in your calendar.
Languages. Every language multiplies the work that comes after the design. A twelve page site in two languages is twenty four pages to write, translate, review and link check, plus hreflang and a navigation that stays in step.
Integrations. A booking engine, a CRM, a payment gateway or an ERP each add scope, testing and a dependency you do not control.
Migrating an existing site. The redirect map is the job. Old URLs hide in footers, in the consent links of forms, in PDFs and in legal texts. A bulk find and replace run in dry mode is not a change: nothing is done until a real request against the live site proves it.
Accessibility and legal pages. Keyboard navigation, contrast, visible focus, cookie consent and privacy texts are work, not a checkbox.
Access to what already exists. If your current supplier holds the hosting account, some fixes are not available to anybody else, and a configuration job turns into a migration.
Brand identity. A logo system, a brand book and photography direction are a separate discipline. Folded into a website quote, they are the single biggest swing.
Eight questions to ask before you sign
1. Who owns the repository, the domain and the hosting account on launch day? 2. Where does the backend live? A managed backend inside a builder tends to become a migration later. 3. If I view the source of a page, is my content already in the HTML, or does it appear only once JavaScript runs? Search crawlers and AI assistants read the HTML they are served. 4. What is included in maintenance, in writing, and what is out of scope? “Out of scope” is the sentence that stalls a site for months. 5. What happens when we leave? Export format, handover, who holds the keys. 6. How do you verify a deploy? “It worked in staging” is not verification. 7. Who writes and translates the content, and is that inside the price? 8. What is the total for the first twelve months, not just for the build?
How to make two quotes comparable
Add the build, the content and translation, hosting, maintenance and the domain across twelve months. Hosting for a normal marketing site is small: our own estimate for a standard setup is in the region of 10 to 30 EUR a month. Maintenance is where two similar quotes separate, so put it on the table before you compare anything.
Where Polargate's prices sit
We publish ours, so you can place them on the scale above. We work in the fourth tier.
A website costs from 7,600 EUR, and up to 12,000 EUR with brand identity included. A standard multilingual site takes four to six weeks from kickoff to launch. Branding, a large amount of new content or a booking engine integration extend that.
The work runs in phases and starts with a Discovery Sprint of fixed scope, which ends with a written scope and a fixed price for the build. What you get at the end is yours to own: your repository, your Supabase, your Vercel account.
If what you need is tier one or tier two, our price is the wrong price for you, and we will say so on the first call.
Three things to remember
Compare what is inside the tier, not the number at the bottom of the page. Ask who owns the result before you sign, not after. And put maintenance in the same table as the build, because the site you launch is not the site you will have in two years.
