Ask five Nairobi web companies for a quote on the same brief and you can easily get back KSh 20,000, KSh 90,000, KSh 250,000 and a polite refusal to name a number until you book a call. That spread is not a scam. It usually means five different things are being quoted for.
Here is what actually moves the price, so you can read a quote properly instead of just picking the cheapest one.
The four things that set the number
Page count
A four-page site and a twenty-page site are genuinely different amounts of work — but not four times different, because the design system is built once and reused. Be realistic about what you need at launch. Most service businesses launch well on four to seven pages and add more later.
Whether the site does anything
A site that displays information is one price. A site that takes bookings, processes M-Pesa payments, manages a product catalogue or holds customer accounts is a different category of work, because there is logic to build and test, and things that can break. This is the single biggest jump in any quote.
Who writes the words and takes the photos
This is where budgets quietly disappear. If you supply your text and photography, the build is straightforward. If someone has to interview you, write your service pages from scratch and arrange a photoshoot, you are commissioning copywriting and photography as well as a website. Both are worth paying for. Just know that’s what you’re buying.
How it’s built
A hand-coded site costs more in labour up front and less to run, because there is no platform subscription and no plugin licences. A page-builder or hosted-platform site is faster to stand up and cheaper to start, but you rent it indefinitely and you inherit its limits on speed and structure. Neither is universally right. But do ask which one you’re being sold, because “custom website” is used to describe both.
Roughly what things cost
| What you’re buying | Realistic range |
|---|---|
| Simple service or brochure site, you supply content | KSh 15,000 – 40,000 |
| Service site with booking or enquiry flow and search groundwork | KSh 25,000 – 80,000 |
| Online store with catalogue and payments | KSh 35,000 – 200,000 |
| Full brand work, copywriting and photography included | KSh 150,000 upwards |
| Ongoing maintenance | KSh 1,500 – 10,000 per month |
At the top of the market, established Nairobi agencies publish starter packages beginning in the low hundreds of thousands and e-commerce work running to seven figures. That is real work for organisations with real complexity — but it is not the benchmark a two-person salon should be measuring itself against.
Costs people forget to budget for
- Domain name — roughly KSh 1,000 to 2,500 a year, and it should be registered in your name, not your developer’s.
- Hosting — anywhere from free, for a static hand-coded site, to a few thousand shillings a month for something with a database.
- Photography — the most common reason a finished site still looks cheap.
- Someone to keep it current — a site with last year’s prices on it costs you trust.
Five questions to ask any quote
- Do I own the code and the domain when this is finished?
- What do I have to keep paying monthly, and to whom?
- Are page titles, descriptions, sitemap and business schema included, or extra?
- Who writes the text and who supplies the photos?
- What happens if I want a change three months after launch, and what does it cost?
A supplier who answers all five plainly is usually a safer bet than one who is slightly cheaper and vague. The expensive mistake in this market is rarely overpaying. It is paying twice, because the first site couldn’t be found, couldn’t be edited, or couldn’t be taken with you.
Where we sit, for transparency
Veune Cour publishes its prices: booking and service sites from KSh 15,000, online stores from KSh 35,000, with analytics, M-Pesa and an AI chat assistant priced separately as add-ons. That’s at the accessible end of this market deliberately, because the businesses we build for are usually buying their first proper website and need it to pay for itself before they spend more.