A business website in the Netherlands is sold in bands, and the band you buy decides most of the price before anyone talks about design. This article describes those bands, what moves the number inside each one, and what a Dutch buyer pays for that a buyer elsewhere often does not. It does not quote other studios' prices, because we have not measured them. It does quote ours.
The four bands
Do it yourself. A subscription builder or a bought theme. The invoice is small and the real cost is your own time. Fine for one page, a contact form and a phone number.
One freelancer. A zzp'er, usually a theme customised for you, billed by the hour or as a small fixed price. The cheapest real invoice, and the most concentrated risk: one person, one calendar, and no handover if that person stops.
A small studio. A fixed price per project, design and build together, multilingual, technical SEO included. This is where most mid-market sites land, and where Polargate sits: from 7,600 EUR, and up to 12,000 EUR with brand identity in scope.
A full-service bureau. Strategy, account management, design, build and sprints, usually on an hourly rate or a monthly retainer. The largest number and the most process. It makes sense when there is an internal marketing team to feed.
What actually moves the price
Templates, not pages
Twenty pages built from the same template cost barely more than five. Five pages that each need their own layout cost like five small projects. When you compare two quotes, compare page templates, not page counts.
Languages
Dutch plus English means two of every sentence, and often a third market later. Translating is the cheap part. Keeping both versions in sync for years, with the right language served to the right visitor and to search engines, is the part that costs.
Content
Decide who writes the text before you sign anything. Copy that is still being argued about internally is the most common reason a launch date moves, and it is the one part a supplier cannot do for you at speed.
Integrations
A booking engine, a CRM, a payment provider, an ERP. Each one is its own small project with its own ways of breaking. A quote that says integrations without naming them is not a quote yet.
What a Dutch procurement process adds
Even at mid-market size, a Dutch buyer tends to run a real inkooptraject: two or three offertes side by side, references, algemene voorwaarden, and a verwerkersovereenkomst under the AVG before anything goes live. Budget calendar time for it, not only money.
And then use it, because these are the questions worth asking anyway. Get four answers in writing:
- Who owns the repository, and from which commit.
- Whose name is on the hosting, domain and analytics accounts.
- Where the data is processed, and which subprocessors are involved.
- Whether the supplier can sign a verwerkersovereenkomst, and what is in it.
A website you cannot take somewhere else is not cheaper. It is paid for later.
The European Accessibility Act
Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act applies to consumer-facing digital services across the EU, and the Netherlands has it in national law. If you sell to consumers online, a webshop, tickets, banking, e-books or telecom, your site is in scope. The technical reference is EN 301 549, which for a website means WCAG 2.1 level AA. The directive exempts microenterprises providing services, fewer than ten people and under two million euro a year, so check whether you are in scope before you budget for it.
For pricing, the thing that matters is when you do it. Built in from the start it is a modest surcharge, and most of it is design discipline: contrast, a visible focus state, real labels on form fields, targets large enough to hit, and a keyboard path through every interactive element. Retrofitted afterwards it is far more expensive, because the fixes touch every template you already paid for.
Ask a supplier for evidence, not a promise. Accessible is a word anyone can type into an offerte. A keyboard-only walkthrough and a screen reader pass are things somebody has to have actually done.
Hourly rate or fixed price
Both models are normal in the Dutch market. The difference that matters is who carries the estimate.
An hourly rate is not a price. A rate multiplied by an unknown number of hours is an unknown. If an offerte is built on an uurtarief, ask for the estimated hours per deliverable and for the rule that applies above it, because that is where meerwerk lives.
A fixed price moves the estimating risk to the supplier, and that is what the margin inside it pays for. It only works when the scope is written down first, which is why the work starts with a fixed-scope discovery instead of a proposal written from one phone call.
Nacalculatie, billing for the hours actually spent, is the right model later, for maintenance and evolution, where nobody can honestly scope a year in advance. It is the wrong model for a build with a defined end.
Polargate does not sell website builds by the hour: a fixed price for the agreed scope, and a separate pool of hours for what comes after launch.
Dutch as a working language
The copy is the small part. The reviews, the feedback rounds and the launch checklist are where a language gap turns into cost, because translated text that nobody in the room can read comfortably gets approved without being read. Polargate works in Dutch, English and Spanish.
What Polargate charges
From 7,600 EUR for a hotel or small company site, and up to 12,000 EUR when brand identity is part of the scope. Four to six weeks from kickoff to launch for a standard multilingual site. The price is fixed, quoted in euros, and quoted after a fixed-scope discovery rather than before it.
The work is senior-led: the same senior engineer is accountable for the architecture, the build and the reviews, with specialists brought in per project. Every page is pre-rendered as static HTML, so search engines, screen readers and AI assistants read the same content a person does. The repository, the Supabase project and the hosting accounts are yours.
How to compare two offertes
- Is the scope identical on both: page templates, languages, integrations, and who writes the content.
- Fixed price or hours. If hours, the estimate and the meerwerk rule in writing.
- Accessibility inside the scope, or parked as a later phase.
- Who owns the code and the accounts when the project ends.
- What happens after launch, and what that costs per month.
The cheapest quote is usually the one with the least written in it. That is not a discount, it is a smaller scope.
