The question always arrives the same way: what does a website cost? And a serious answer always arrives as another question, which sounds like evasion and is not.
The reason is simple. Three things that do not resemble each other share the word "website", and inside each of them the price is moved by decisions the person asking has usually not made yet.
First: which of the three
A presentation site. It says who you are, what you do, how to reach you. The content is finite and written once. After launch it changes rarely.
A shop. Catalogue, cart, orders, at least one payment method and a fiscal receipt. It is not a site with one extra button — it is a system holding stock, order states and money, and it has to work on a Saturday evening.
An application. Accounts, roles, data that changes, rules describing how the company works. Here the site is only the window; the actual thing is underneath.
The distance between the first and the third is wider than the distance between a car and a lorry. A price quoted before knowing which one is a guess, and whoever gives it has either guessed or decided on your behalf.
What moves the price, in order of weight
Where the content comes from
The most underestimated factor by a distance. A presentation site with the copy written, the photographs taken and the structure decided is a different project from one that starts with "we don't have the text yet".
It is not a hidden charge. It is simply work, and if the company does not do it, somebody paid does.
How many languages
In Moldova the real question is not how many but how many from the start. Three languages designed in cost considerably less than two added on top of a site built for one — because it is not only translation. It is addresses, language tags and the links between versions, and those are designed, not glued on.
Payments
Each additional payment method costs more, and how much varies too widely for an honest range. Not because of the code, but because of everything around it: the legal file the provider asks for, how long approval takes, whether there is a test environment that works.
The provider-by-provider detail for Moldova is here.
The fiscal receipt
If you sell to individuals, the receipt is not optional and not a finishing detail. Who issues it and how it reaches the customer are architecture decisions, not trim, and moving them to the end rewrites the order flow.
What has to talk to what
A shop pulling its products from an existing 1C is a different project from one where products are typed in by hand. Same for stock across two warehouses, or orders that must appear in the accounts without anyone copying them.
Every integration is a negotiation with a system that was not built for you.
Who runs it afterwards
If you want to change copy, prices and images yourself, the place you change them from has to be built. If you don't, it doesn't. Both are correct answers, they cost differently, and the question belongs at the start rather than at handover.
What matters less than people think
The number of pages. Ten pages using the same five blocks are nearly free after the first two. Three pages that look nothing like each other are not.
The choice of technology. "What is it built on" matters to whoever maintains it in two years, not to the invoice.
"Modern design". It is a phrase that describes nothing measurable. What moves the price is whether the layout is a clean, adapted standard one or drawn specifically, with its own illustration and motion.
The one number we publish
For a working shop — catalogue, cart, orders, one payment method and a fiscal receipt — the floor is around $2,000.
It is a floor, not an offer, and it is the only one on this site. The rule stays the same: a price given before the perimeter is a guess.
What to prepare before asking for a quote
Five answers, and any conversation becomes ten times shorter:
- Which of the three — presentation, shop, application
- Do you have the copy and the images? If not, who makes them
- How many languages, from the start
- Are you selling online? If so: to businesses, to individuals, or both
- What does it have to talk to — 1C, accounting, existing stock, nothing
With those five, a serious price can be given in a single conversation. Without them, any figure is a guess — including ours.