How much does a website cost in Switzerland?

“Price is what you pay; value is what you get.”
— Warren Buffett, 2009

Picture the scene. Two proposals land in your inbox. Same brief, same company, same needs. The first looks too good to be true; the second looks like someone added a zero by mistake. The trouble is that neither one really explains where its numbers come from. And you're the one who has to decide. For the record, I'm somewhere in between, and my prices are public, which in this business is almost a provocation.

I've been building websites for Swiss businesses for fifteen years, most of that time on my own. It's the question I get asked most, usually carefully, by someone who's afraid of overpaying but can't prove it either way. The answer is simple: what you pay for has almost nothing to do with what you see on screen.

Website price ranges for a small business in Switzerland

At TONYTONY, a professional website for a Swiss SME costs from CHF 1,900 for a showcase site to CHF 12,900 and up for a fully bespoke project. A large-scale redesign or an e-commerce build starts at around CHF 15,000. Here are my own prices, exactly as I publish them:

Page count is only there as a marker of scope, not as the unit of price. What takes you from CHF 1,900 to 4,900 is a CMS you run yourself and complete SEO; what takes you to 12,900 is strategy, copywriting and a design built for your business alone. Each package is detailed on my pricing page .

That leaves the gap from the start: CHF 500 on one side, 25,000 on the other, for the same brief. Most of the time, those two quotes aren't pricing the same work, and per-page billing is exactly what hides it.

Why pricing a website "per page" no longer makes sense

When you ask for a quote, you're often shown a table: Home, About, Services, Contact, multiplied by a rate. It's clear and it's reassuring, but it's a logic inherited from print, where a page really was a unit of cost.

A page is not a unit of work

The web works very differently. A single page with a configurator, a booking flow and pricing logic can take me weeks. Laying out twenty pages of text and images can take three days. Page count tells you nothing about how complex the design, the build or the maintenance will be.

If you're billed that way, either the provider sells everyone the same standard package, or they're hoping you won't ask what's under the hood. The real question should be: "What's the hardest part of this site, and who's going to build it?"

The cost of the layers in between

In a heavily structured agency, your budget pays for two things: the technical work and the organization around it. You're paying the project manager, the account manager, the creative director... while a freelancer somewhere at the end of the chain writes the code.

That's a useful model for very large projects that need a lot of coordination. But on an SME project, you're often the one funding that structure. I worked that way in Berlin for years: a decision that takes me ten minutes today took a week of meetings back then, and the site wasn't any better for it.

Agencies remain the right choice once a project outgrows what one person can handle. The problem is paying for that structure without even knowing you're funding it.

1. Pay for a custom system, not a bought template

A purchased template with your logo dropped on top doesn't justify a five-figure invoice. What gives a budget its value is what's built specifically for you, and didn't exist before.

Where should your money go?

Templates are designed to cover every possible use case , from a restaurant to a law firm. So they ship sliders, plugins and scripts you'll never need, which still load on every visit. The result: slower pages, degraded Core Web Vitals and a risky dependence on plugins that may stop being updated.

That's the comparison Samuel Devantéry, a photographer in Sierre, made when he put my proposal side by side with free WordPress themes . His site ran on one of them, and it had served him well for years. But what he needed now, being found for "photographe Valais" or "studio photo Sierre", is not what a generic theme is built to do. Rebuilding his site on Webflow closed that gap; it wasn't about adding pages.

Good work does the opposite: components designed for your business, clean, readable code, and a fast page because everything superfluous has been taken out.

2. Build SEO and AEO in from the architecture

Insist that SEO and AEO are part of how the site is designed, not an add-on. If a quote lists "SEO optimization" as an option you can drop to cut the bill, be careful. SEO isn't a coat of paint you add at the end; it's the way the site is built.

Build it in from the start, or forget it

Some things can only be handled during development:

• A heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3) based on the real content, not on how the page looks.
• Schema.org markup (JSON-LD) so search engines and AI understand exactly what you sell.
• Correct hreflang handling for your French, German and English versions.

That last point matters more in Switzerland than almost anywhere else. A Swiss site is often three sites in one. If the languages are signaled badly, you risk serving the German version to a reader in Lausanne. Fixing that after the fact always costs far more than doing it right on day one.

The same logic applies to AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), optimizing for answer engines: ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity read a site's structure before they read its text. Without structure, you're invisible to them, and that's a growing share of how people look for a provider today.

3. Count the intermediaries behind the quote

Every time a project changes hands, some information gets lost: from sales to designer, from designer to developer, from developer to whoever maintains it. Add those handovers up and you feel them in the timeline, the final quality and the invoice.

Talk directly to whoever builds it

When you work with a single expert, you explain your business once. The person who designs the interface is the one who writes the code, so nothing gets lost between the mockup and what actually works on a phone. Decisions take an afternoon rather than several "sprints", and that's what lets you halve your website project timeline .

And if you want to change a detail two weeks after launch, you write straight to the person who built the site, with no ticket system and no contract amendment. There's a trade-off, and it's worth naming: a one-person studio has limits on volume and on parallel projects. For a Swiss SME website, that's almost never the constraint. For a platform rolled out across fifty markets, it is.

What happens to your site after launch

The real difference between a "cheap" site and a good one shows up in year two. The first one works... until an update breaks your contact form, or you want to add a language and find out the structure won't allow it.

That's when you have to rebuild everything , so you pay twice. Nobody mentioned that second invoice, because it builds up quietly, one line of code at a time.

Technical debt: the cost no quote shows

A well-built site can evolve, grow and be handed to another developer without a rescue operation. You own the code, the structure can take another language, and you're not locked into anyone else's maintenance contract.

That's how I work: architecture and technical constraints first, speed of execution second. An honest web development budget pays for that thinking phase. Skipping it isn't saving money; it's just pushing the expense two years down the road.

Three questions to ask before you sign

To see things more clearly, ask three questions:

• Who actually writes the code?
• What happens if you want to switch providers tomorrow?
• Can they show you the site they're proudest of, opened on a phone over 4G?

The answers will tell you far more than the total at the bottom of the quote, and they cost nothing to get.

👉 Send me your quotes or your ideas, and I'll give you an honest technical view of the scope you actually need. Get in touch