The meeting takes place in a vaulted cellar on rue des Granges, in Besançon. The owner — a wine merchant who just took over his uncle's shop — lays four A4 sheets on the wine barrel serving as a coffee table. Four quotes for the same project: a brochure website with vintages presentation, a vintage blog, a reservation form for tastings.

Quote n°1: €990 ex-VAT. A well-known SaaS platform, turn-key template, monthly subscription included the first year.

Quote n°2: €2,500 ex-VAT. A small local agency from the Battant district, WordPress + premium theme.

Quote n°3: €6,000 ex-VAT. A senior freelancer — me, in this case — custom-built site, OVH hosting, GDPR-compliant, no subscription.

Quote n°4: €15,000 ex-VAT. A Paris-based agency in the 11th arrondissement, full brand overhaul, design system, 6-month SEO roadmap.

"For the same site," he repeats, perplexed. Except it isn't the same site. After two hours opening each quote line by line, he understood why a factor of 15 separates the cheapest from the most expensive — without any one of them being objectively a scam. Here's what we discussed that day.

Why 4 quotes for the same website?

When a business owner asks for "a website", they describe a visible outcome — a few pages, a design that matches their shop, a contact form. What each vendor hears is something completely different:

• The €990 platform hears: "rent an existing template, drag-and-drop three images, collect a monthly subscription forever".
• The €2,500 local agency hears: "install WordPress, pick a theme, configure 3 plugins, ship in 3 weeks".
• The €6,000 senior freelancer hears: "understand the business, write a custom-built site, optimize for Besançon local SEO, ship without technical debt, explain how to keep it alive".
• The €15,000 Paris agency hears: "brand overhaul, design system, SEO audit, content plan, four-person team".

None of them is lying. None of them is cheating. Each is selling what they know how to do, with their own cost structure. The trap is comparing the numbers without comparing the scopes. It's exactly like comparing a guesthouse in Vesoul to a suite at the Lutetia because "they both have a bed".

What the €990 packages hide

The €990 quote seduced the wine merchant. Logical: ten times cheaper than mine. Except the first year actually costs €990, and the following years cost between €360 and €600 ex-VAT in subscription, indefinitely. Over five years, you're between €2,800 and €3,400 — already more expensive than the local agency's quote, and still without owning your site.

But that's not the worst. Three other traps, verified on his screenshots:

• Frozen template. Pages are fill-in-the-blank, not a site written for his business. Impossible to render the vintages catalogue the way he imagines it, because that component doesn't exist in the library.
• Non-existent or miserable SEO. No HTML control, no image optimization, no Schema.org markup, and a shared subdomain that crushes the domain authority. Result: his site never ranks page one for "wine shop Besançon".
• Export impossible. When he wants to leave, he discovers data exports as CSV — but not the design, not the pages, not the URLs. Everything has to be rebuilt.

For 70% of shopkeepers, these platforms are perfect — truly. If you just want an online presence, with three standard pages and zero SEO ambition, go for it. But that wasn't what the wine merchant wanted. He wanted to be found on Google when a tourist searches "wine cellar downtown Besançon".

The real cost of a custom website in 2026

Let's break down a typical custom brochure site — 8 to 10 pages, blog, forms, SEO-optimized, GDPR-compliant. Here's what I bill, line by line, in actual hours:

Item

Hours

Cost (at €65/h)

Discovery, workshops, wireframes

6-10 h

€390 - €650

Design (mockups, brand, responsive)

12-20 h

€780 - €1,300

HTML/CSS/JS integration

15-25 h

€975 - €1,625

Back-office (CMS or PHP/PostgreSQL pages)

10-20 h

€650 - €1,300

Technical SEO + semantics + Schema.org

6-10 h

€390 - €650

GDPR (notices, cookies, registry)

2-4 h

€130 - €260

QA, deployment, client training

4-8 h

€260 - €520

Total

55-97 h

€3,575 - €6,305

OVH hosting then costs between €35 and €120 per year depending on size — per year, not per month. Domain name: €12 per year. Maintenance: on-demand, around €65 per hour. No subscription, no vendor lock-in: the site belongs to the client, source code shipped, private GitHub shared.

This is the breakdown I systematically send with my quotes. Clients often compare it to what they received from other vendors and realize that "€6,000 for a site" means nothing in itself — it's €6,000 for 80 hours of skilled work, exactly matching my public rate sheet.

Realistic price grid in Besançon and BFC region

To compare what's comparable, here are the ranges I observe on the Besançon and Burgundy-Franche-Comté market in 2026 — among senior freelancers and serious small agencies (not low-cost platforms, not national agencies):

Site type

Pages / Features

Range ex-VAT

Simple brochure site

5 pages, contact form, basic SEO, responsive

€1,500 - €2,500

Brochure + blog

10 pages, CMS-backed blog, advanced SEO, full GDPR

€2,500 - €4,500

Simple e-commerce

up to 100 products, Stripe payment, basic stock management

€4,000 - €8,000

Advanced e-commerce

multi-catalog, ERP integration, pro accounts, B2B/B2C

€8,000 - €18,000

Custom business app

complex back-office, workflows, APIs, multi-role

€8,000 - €25,000+

Three important notes. One, these ranges are starting points — a 5-page brochure site with demanding design can exceed €2,500 without anything abnormal. Two, they exclude hosting (€35-120/year), domain (€12/year) and maintenance (billed hourly or as a package). Three, they align on French senior freelancer pricing — not a SaaS platform, not a big Paris agency, not an offshore vendor.

For format-by-format detail, see SME brochure website and website creation.

The Pass Commerce Artisanat grant — 30% refunded

This is the argument few vendors mention, because it doesn't suit them commercially: the Burgundy-Franche-Comté Region refunds 30% of the website cost, up to €7,500 of grant, via the Pass Commerce Artisanat scheme.

Concretely, on a website billed €6,000 ex-VAT, the eligible business recovers €1,800. The real cost drops to €4,200. It's no longer twice as expensive as the local €2,500 agency — it's almost the same price, for a site without subscription, custom-built and SEO-optimized for local search.

Eligibility: be a shop, artisan, or business with fewer than 10 employees, located in Burgundy-Franche-Comté, and use a vendor that isn't a SaaS platform (Wix, Shopify, Squarespace are not eligible — you need an "owned" website). The file is built with the chamber of commerce or trades, typically over 4 to 8 weeks. Full details on the Pass Commerce BFC page.

For the wine merchant on rue des Granges, this was decisive. His €6,000 quote became a €4,200 net cost — €30 per month over five years for a site he owns, versus €50/month subscription forever on the €990 platform.

How to choose: 4 criteria that filter out scams

At the end of the meeting, I gave him four simple criteria. Not to choose between him and me — to choose among all the vendors who would solicit him over the next six months.

1. Is the source code delivered? If the answer is "no" or "depends on the subscription", it's a disguised platform. You're renting, not owning. Sometimes legitimate, but it has to be an informed choice, not a discovery two years later.

2. How long before the first well-ranked page on Google? Nobody can guarantee a position, but a serious vendor can estimate: "3 to 6 months for local queries, 12-18 months for competitive ones". A "well, you never know" or "SEO is complicated" answer is a red flag. SEO isn't magic — it's clean HTML, relevant content, backlinks, Core Web Vitals, and patience.

3. Does the quote break down hours per item? A serious quote decomposes: discovery, design, integration, back-office, SEO, GDPR, QA. A quote saying "complete site: €4,500" without any breakdown means the vendor doesn't know how many hours they'll spend — so they either take an enormous margin or underestimate and ship sloppy.

4. Can you meet the vendor physically? For a Besançon shop owner, a developer who can grab a coffee at Brasserie 1802 and look at the code together for 30 minutes is worth a lot more than a vendor in Paris or Manila. Not for chauvinism — for the speed of business iterations. See local freelancer vs offshore: what nobody tells you about real cost for details.

What to take away

The wine merchant eventually picked quote n°3. Not because it was the cheapest (it wasn't), nor because it was the most prestigious (far from it). Because it was the only quote where he understood, line by line, what he was buying — and could calculate the total five-year cost factoring in hosting, maintenance, the absence of subscription, and the BFC grant.

"The right price for a website" isn't a range. It's the price at which you understand what you're paying for, where the quote hides nothing, where you aren't locked in after the fact, and where the vendor can explain their choices without blushing. In Besançon, in 2026, that lands between €2,500 and €8,000 for 95% of SMEs — and drops another 30% with the Pass Commerce BFC.

If you want a detailed quote for your project, we can meet — I have a decent coffee 200 meters from Place de la Révolution. Full rate sheets are public on the site, no tricks.