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The margin has to come from somewhere
A S$499 site cannot include days of work. It is delivered by filling a template quickly. That is not a scandal — it is arithmetic. The problem starts when the brief needed days of work.
Mechanic, not malice
Quotes in this market run from S$299 to S$30,000+. This page shows what changes at each step, what our packages cost, and what the two-year bill looks like — not just the launch price.
Drag it. Every band below is a real slice of the Singapore market — including the ones where we are the wrong choice.
This is our Starter band. Same price we publish on the web design page — no page-specific discount, no anchor pricing.
Search this and you will see S$299 next to S$30,000. Both are real. They are not the same product, and nobody explains the difference — so here it is, including the bands where we are not the answer.
| Band | What you actually get | Where it works | What you are accepting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under S$1,000 | A template, filled in. Often a page builder on a shared theme, one round of edits, little or no strategy. | A brand-new business that needs to exist online this month, or a one-page presence for a side venture. | Your site looks like the demo. Changes usually cost extra. Nobody is maintaining it after handover. |
| S$1,000–S$2,500 | A small custom-arranged site, or a properly built single landing page. Real copy input, mobile done properly. | A focused campaign page, or a small business with a clear single offer. | Limited pages. Integrations and custom features are out of scope at this level. |
| S$2,500–S$5,000 | A hand-built site on a CMS your team can edit, 5–10 pages, structured content, performance and SEO basics done at build time. | Most Singapore SMEs. This is the band where a website starts being an asset rather than a brochure. | Fixed scope. Extra pages, integrations and custom logic are quoted separately. |
| S$5,000–S$8,500 | Larger content structures, custom post types, an integration or two, editor training, launch QA and a redirect map. | Lead-generation sites, multi-service businesses, sites with a blog or resource library that has to scale. | Longer timeline — six to eight weeks — because content and approvals take real time. |
| S$8,000–S$18,000+ | Commerce with a real catalogue, custom UX, migrations, several integrations, roles and permissions. | Stores, portals, group structures, anything where the website runs part of the business. | This is a project with a scope document, not a package. Discovery comes first. |
| S$20,000+ | Custom applications, multi-market platforms, bespoke systems. | When the software is the business. | Nobody should quote this from a package page, including us. |
Notice what is not in that table: a claim that the cheap end is a scam. It is not. A S$499 template is a rational purchase for some businesses — it stops being rational when you expect it to do the job of a S$5,000 site. Cheap web design Singapore buyers get burnt by mismatched expectations far more often than by bad suppliers.
Every figure here is the same figure published on the service page it belongs to. One source of truth, no page-specific pricing.
| Package | From | Typical landing point | What it covers | Detail on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page | S$1,200 | S$1,200 – S$2,500 | One campaign page, copy shaped to the ad, form with conversion tracking, thank-you page | Landing page design |
| Starter site | S$2,500 | S$2,500 – S$4,500 | Up to 5 pages, WordPress CMS with hand-built templates, mobile and Core Web Vitals pass, 30-day support | Web design |
| Growth site | S$5,000 | S$5,000 – S$8,500 | Up to 10 pages, custom post types, blog and resources, one integration, redirect map and launch QA | Web design |
| Corporate | S$7,500 | Scoped above that | Careers and newsroom as their own content types, case library, permissions matrix, UAT and recorded training | Corporate website design |
| Ecommerce launch | S$5,000 | — | Focused catalogue, core templates, payment and delivery configuration, basic training | Ecommerce website design |
| Ecommerce growth | S$8,000 | S$8,000 – S$18,000+ | Custom UX, larger catalogue, content migration, advanced filtering, SEO foundations, selected integrations | Ecommerce website design |
| Web application | Scoped | Quoted after discovery | Client portals, booking engines, quotation tools — user accounts, database, admin back end | Web development |
| Care plan | S$150 / month | Scoped for stores | Daily off-site backups, monitoring, updates on staging, monthly security and speed check, small edits | Website maintenance |
What is deliberately not on this list: SEO, Google Ads and social media retainers. They are priced on their own pages because bundling them here would let a cheap build hide inside a big monthly number — which is exactly the trick this page exists to expose.
Not because the supplier was dishonest. Because of five mechanics that are built into how a very low price has to be delivered.
A S$499 site cannot include days of work. It is delivered by filling a template quickly. That is not a scandal — it is arithmetic. The problem starts when the brief needed days of work.
Mechanic, not maliceLow build prices are usually recovered on change requests. Two years of “can you just move that” at an hourly rate quietly overtakes the difference between the cheap quote and the proper one.
Ask for the hourly rate up frontPage-builder shortcodes are not portable. When you move, the content does not come cleanly — so the next agency quotes a rebuild rather than a migration, and you pay full price again.
Ask what happens if you leaveThe cheap build almost never includes care. Twelve months later there are forty pending updates, an expired certificate and a form that stopped delivering — and the cleanup is quoted as an emergency.
See what a month of care containsThe single biggest hidden cost. A site that was never structured to grow gets replaced early — and the replacement starts the same clock. Two cheap builds cost more than one built to last.
The bill nobody forecastsA three-page presence for a new one-person business, or a placeholder while the real business model is still moving. In those cases paying us would be the mistake, and we will say so on the call.
The honest exceptionSame business, three routes, twenty-four months. Every figure in our column is published elsewhere on this site; the other columns are the market ranges from Chapter 01, not claims about any specific supplier.
| Consideration | Budget route | Mid route | Our Starter + care |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build | S$500 – S$1,000 | S$1,500 – S$2,500 | S$2,500 |
| Maintenance, 24 months | Usually none | Ad hoc, billed hourly | S$150 × 24 = S$3,600 |
| Change requests | Billed per change | Billed per change | Small edits included |
| Rebuild within 24 months | Common | Sometimes | Not the plan — it is built to extend |
| Who holds the code | Often the supplier | Varies — ask | You, from day one |
| Two-year total | Low on paper, unpredictable in practice | Depends entirely on how much you change | S$6,100, known in advance |
We are not claiming the budget route always ends badly — plenty of cheap sites run happily for years. The point is narrower and it is the only one we can prove: our two-year number is knowable today, and on a build-only quote nobody's is.
Most of these are within your control, which is why we list them before you ask rather than after you have signed.
Every quote we send is fixed against a written scope with an explicit not-included list. If the scope changes, we re-quote that change before doing it — you should never learn the price of something after it has been built.
We do not have a S$500 package and we are not going to invent one. But you searched for affordable web design, so leaving you with nothing useful would be the lazy answer.
At that budget you have three sensible routes, and none of them is a small agency pretending to be cheap:
Three questions to ask whoever you choose, in any band. They cost nothing and they are the ones that decide your year two:
If the answers are vague, the price is not the number you were quoted. That is true of us too — so ours are on this page in writing.
We are a good fit from about S$2,500, and honest about it below that.
Across the market, quotes run from about S$299 to S$30,000 and above, which is why the question is nearly unanswerable without a scope. Ours: a landing page from S$1,200, a five-page Starter site from S$2,500, a ten-page Growth site from S$5,000, Corporate from S$7,500, and ecommerce from S$5,000 for a launch store. Care plans start at S$150 per month. Those are the same figures published on each service page — there is no separate pricing for people who land here.
Cheap is not automatically bad — it is a different product. A template filled in quickly is a rational purchase for a new one-person business that needs to exist online this month. It stops being rational when you expect it to do the job of a S$5,000 site: structured content, integrations, editable by your team, built to grow. Most bad outcomes in this market come from mismatched expectations rather than bad suppliers.
Because they are different products, and the honest comparison is not launch price but two-year cost. A S$499 build usually recovers its margin on change requests, rarely includes maintenance, and often locks content into a page builder so the next agency quotes a rebuild rather than a migration. Our Starter at S$2,500 plus twenty-four months of care at S$150 comes to S$6,100 — a number you can know today. On a build-only quote, nobody's two-year number is knowable.
Included in every build: design, hand-built templates, a CMS your team can edit, mobile and Core Web Vitals passes, a contact form, launch QA and 30 days of post-launch support. Not included, and quoted separately when needed: photography and video, copywriting beyond what we shape from your material, paid stock or plugin licences, hosting and domain fees, and any integration beyond the one named in your tier. Every quote carries an explicit not-included list — you should never find out what was excluded after the fact.
Yes, fixed against a written scope. The figures on this page are starting points for that scope, not a quote. If the scope changes mid-project — you add a page type, a new integration, another language — we re-quote that change before building it. What we will not do is discover extra cost at the end and present it as an invoice.
No. Every build includes 30 days of post-launch support, and after that a care plan is optional. What is not optional is somebody doing the work — updates, backups, monitoring, expiry tracking. If you have a technical person in-house, we will hand over the checklist for free. The only choice that reliably costs more later is nobody doing it at all.
Builds are normally split across project milestones rather than paid upfront in full, and the schedule is written into the scope before work starts. Care plans are billed monthly. We would rather agree the schedule at the beginning than have an awkward conversation halfway through a build.
Then the first question is whether you need a rebuild at all. Often the honest answer is a targeted fix, a redesign of two page types, or simply a care plan — all of which cost less than a new site. We audit what exists first and tell you which of the three you are looking at, including when the answer is that your current site is fine.
We run those services, but we deliberately do not bundle them into web design packages. A combined monthly figure makes it easy for a thin build to hide inside a big retainer, and it makes leaving expensive. Build and marketing are priced separately so you can judge each on its own merits — and change one without renegotiating the other.
The ones people usually mean are hosting, domain renewal, paid plugin or app licences, photography, and platform subscriptions if you are on a hosted commerce platform. None of those are hidden by us — they are identified separately in your scope with the expected amounts, because they are third-party costs that stay yours regardless of who builds the site. The only figure we control is our own, and it is on this page.
Including when the answer is that your number does not stretch to what you are describing — and what to do about it. Nobody needs another quote that arrives after three meetings.
UPSCALED PTE. LTD. · UEN 202219997D · 80 Playfair Road, #03-02A, Kapo Factory Building, Singapore 367998 · Mon–Fri 9am–6pm SGT