In 2026, outsourcing a website to India costs roughly £1,800 to £4,400 for a custom business site of eight to fifteen pages, £4,400 to £10,600 for a marketing site with a design system and a blog, and £3,500 to £31,000 for a web app, which is about $2,400 to $6,000, $6,000 to $14,300 and $4,800 to $41,700. In the UK the same three tiers run £3,000 to £10,000, £10,000 to £30,000 and up, and £20,000 to £45,000 for a first web app. In the US, $3,000 to $10,000, $10,000 to $30,000 and up, and $25,000 and up.
Those gaps are real, and they are not the most useful thing in this guide. The most useful thing is where the gap closes: for a small brochure site, outsourcing saves almost nothing, because a UK freelancer builds five pages for £1,500 to £3,000 and the coordination costs you the same whether the site has five pages or forty. The saving becomes real at around two weeks of design and build, and grows from there.
This guide prices the decision from a British or American desk. The Indian market figures behind it, in rupees and with the per-page arithmetic, are in our website development cost guide for India.
What it costs, in the UK, the US and India
| What you are building | UK agency or freelancer | US agency or freelancer | Built in India |
|---|---|---|---|
| Template site, 5 to 10 pages, your logo and copy dropped in | £10 to £50 a month on a builder, or £500 to £1,500 from a freelancer | $0 to $300 on a builder, $500 to $2,000 from a freelancer | £130 to £660, $180 to $900 |
| Custom business site, 8 to 15 pages, a CMS, forms, analytics, redirects from the old site | £3,000 to £10,000; a ten-page company site is typically £4,000 to £12,000 | $3,000 to $10,000 | £1,800 to £4,400, $2,400 to $6,000 |
| Marketing site, 15 to 40 pages, a design system, a blog, CRM and booking integrations | £10,000 to £30,000 and up | $10,000 to $30,000 and up | £4,400 to £10,600, $6,000 to $14,300 |
| Online store | £5,000 to £20,000 and up | $5,000 to $25,000 and up | £1,800 to £17,700, $2,400 to $23,800 |
| Web app or customer portal, with sign-in and per-user data | £20,000 to £45,000 for a first version | At $100 to $200 an hour, usually $25,000 and up | £3,500 to £31,000, $4,800 to $41,700 |
Pound and dollar figures for India use 113 rupees to the pound and 84 to the dollar, the rates across our cost guides. The UK and US ranges are what agencies and freelancers in those countries publish for 2026, where design day rates run £200 to £550, development £250 to £900, and US hourly rates $50 to $150 for freelancers and $100 to $200 for agencies. London agencies commonly charge 50 to 100 percent more than regional ones for the same scope.
Where outsourcing stops being worth it
Read the first two rows again. A five-page brochure site from a UK freelancer costs £1,500 to £3,000. The same five pages designed and built properly in India, without a CMS or a relaunch, cost about 3 lakh, which is £2,650. For a US buyer the comparison is $2,000 to $8,000 against $3,570. The offshore saving on a small site is somewhere between nothing and a few hundred pounds.
Then add what the offshore route costs you that a local one does not. Someone on your side writes the brief, supplies the content, reviews the design and answers questions in a window that overlaps with India. That is half a day a week for the length of the project, and it is the same half a day whether the site is five pages or forty. On a two-week brochure site it eats the saving. On a ten-week marketing site it disappears into it.
So the rule we give people who ask, even though it costs us the small jobs:
- Under about £3,000 or $5,000 of scope, build locally or use a template. The saving is too small to pay for the coordination.
- From about two weeks of design and build upward, the saving is real: a few thousand pounds on a business site, £5,000 to £20,000 on a marketing site, and more on a store or a web app.
- For anything with sign-in, per-user data or integrations, it is large, because those are the weeks that UK and US day rates multiply.
Where the money goes: the same site priced three ways
Our website cost guide works through a ten-page site for a services company: home, about, four service pages, a case study, a blog index, careers and contact, with a CMS so the team can edit it. Here is that estimate in pounds and dollars.
| Work package | Person-days | In India (£) | In India ($) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery: goals, audience, sitemap, what each page must get a visitor to do | 2 | £283 | $381 |
| Content structure: the headings and message of every page, agreed before design | 2 | £283 | $381 |
| Design: a small system of type, colour and components, then ten pages for desktop and mobile | 8 | £850 | $1,143 |
| Build: the components, ten pages, responsive, with the CMS wired to every editable region | 8 | £1,133 | $1,524 |
| CMS setup and content entry, with the team trained to edit | 2 | £283 | $381 |
| Forms, analytics, the CRM connection, cookie consent | 1 | £142 | $190 |
| SEO groundwork: metadata, structured data, the sitemap, the redirect map from the old URLs | 2 | £283 | $381 |
| Performance, accessibility and cross-device testing | 2 | £283 | $381 |
| Launch: DNS, certificates, monitoring, and a week of fixes | 1 | £142 | $190 |
| Total | 28 | About £3,700 | About $5,000 |
The rates are 16,000 rupees a day for everything except design, which is 12,000: about £142 and £106, or $190 and $143. That is about £370 a page all in, and six weeks on the calendar with a designer and a developer working in sequence.
Now price the same 28 days where you are:
| Who does the 28 days | Day rate | Total |
|---|---|---|
| A team in India | £106 to £142 | About £3,700 |
| A UK freelancer | £300 to £500 | £8,400 to £14,000 |
| A UK agency | £500 to £1,000 | £14,000 to £28,000 |
| A US freelancer | $75 to $150 an hour | $16,800 to $33,600 |
| A US agency | $125 to $200 an hour | $28,000 to $44,800 |
Something in that table does not match the published UK price for a ten-page company site, which is £4,000 to £12,000, and the mismatch is the most useful fact in this guide. A UK quote under about £8,000 is not doing 28 days. It starts from a theme, skips discovery and content structure, cuts the SEO groundwork to an afternoon and the testing to a day, and delivers in ten to fifteen days. That is exactly how the Indian template quote at 20,000 to 40,000 rupees gets to its number. The cheap UK site and the cheap Indian site are the same product at different rates, and neither is the 28-day site. Compare the days, not the price.
What stays your job, whoever builds it
An offshore team can design, build and launch the site. Five things stay on your side of the water, and a good offshore quote names them as deliverables rather than discovering them at launch.
If you are in the UK:
- Company details on the site. Under the Companies Act and the 2015 trading disclosure regulations, a limited company shows its full registered name, company number, where it is registered and its registered office address on its website. The home page or footer is enough. The E-Commerce Regulations add a geographic address, an email address and a VAT number if you have one.
- Cookies, under the new rules. PECR was amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, in force since 5 February 2026. Cookies used only to collect statistics about how your own site is used no longer need consent, provided you tell visitors clearly and give them an easy way to object. Advertising and cross-site tracking cookies still need consent, and the maximum fine is now £17.5 million. The cookie banner should be built to those rules, not copied from a 2020 template.
- A privacy notice that matches what the site actually does, under UK GDPR.
- Accessibility. The Equality Act expects reasonable adjustments, and building to WCAG 2.1 AA from the start costs a fraction of retrofitting it.
If you are in the US:
- Accessibility, urgently. Seyfarth counted 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2025, up 27 percent on the year, and trackers that include state courts put the total above 5,000. About 70 percent were against online stores, and accessibility overlay widgets did not reduce the filings. Build to WCAG 2.1 AA and test it; it is cheaper than one demand letter.
- A privacy policy that matches the state laws that apply to you, California's first among them. There is no federal cookie consent law, so the banner question is a state and a product question rather than a legal default.
Everyone:
- Your content and photographs. The thing that delays every website project, in every country, is the client's copy arriving late. Budget your own time for it, or pay a copywriter.
- Your accounts. The domain, the hosting, the analytics and the CMS are registered to you from day one. A site you cannot log into is not yours.
- The decision about hosting location. UK and US buyers usually want the site and its data hosted in their own region, and any decent team will set it up that way if you ask in week one.
How the work runs across time zones
Indore is four and a half hours ahead of London in British Summer Time and five and a half in winter, so an Indian team's afternoon is a UK morning. For a UK buyer that is four to five hours of overlap every working day, which is plenty for a website project: a review call in your morning, revisions done by your afternoon.
For the US it is nine and a half to ten and a half hours ahead of New York and twelve and a half to thirteen and a half ahead of California. A US overlap is a deliberate choice rather than a coincidence, usually the first two or three hours of the American morning. Website projects suit this better than most work, because design review and content are asynchronous by nature: you comment on the page in the evening, the change is there when you wake up.
The habit that decides whether it works is the same in both countries: decisions in writing, one person on your side who owns the answers, and a fixed weekly call. The mechanics of contracts, invoicing and data for British companies are on our page for UK companies, and the fully loaded comparison for hiring a team rather than buying a project is in our guide to the cost of hiring developers in India.
The costs that are not in the quote
| Cost | Typical size | Who pays it |
|---|---|---|
| Your own time | Half a day a week for the project | You, whoever builds it |
| Copywriting | A few hundred to a couple of thousand pounds if you do not write it yourself | Usually a separate line |
| Photography | Stock is cheap; your own team and premises photographed properly is not | You |
| Domain and hosting | A few pounds a year for the domain; £5 to £50 a month for hosting at this size | You, in your own accounts |
| Maintenance | 15 to 25 percent of the build a year, as in every cost guide we publish | Whoever maintains it |
| Exchange rate | Nothing, if the quote is fixed in your currency, which ours are | The team |
Tax. Services exported from India are zero-rated for Indian GST, so no Indian tax appears on the invoice. UK companies usually account for VAT on imported services under the reverse charge, which is normally neutral for a VAT-registered business. US companies generally owe no sales tax on the service. Confirm both with your own accountant.
How to read an offshore website quote
- Count the days, not the pounds. Ask which of the lines in the estimate above are in the quote. A quote with no discovery, no content structure and no SEO groundwork is a template quote, and should be priced like one.
- Ask who writes the copy. If the answer is you, plan for it; it is the usual cause of a six-week project taking twelve.
- Ask whose accounts everything lives in. Domain, hosting, analytics, CMS: yours, from the first day.
- Ask for the legal items as deliverables. Company details in the footer, a cookie banner built to the rules where you are, a privacy notice, and an accessibility check.
- Ask for the redirect map if you are replacing an old site. Losing your rankings costs more than the site.
- Ask who you will talk to, and when. A named person and a fixed weekly slot in your working hours.
- Ask for the price fixed in your currency.
Our wider checklist for choosing who builds it is in how to hire a development company in India.
When not to outsource a website
- When it is small. Under about £3,000 or $5,000 of scope, a local freelancer or a template is the better buy, for the reasons above.
- When you cannot give it half a day a week. The projects that go wrong offshore are the ones nobody on the client side owns.
- When you need someone in the room. Workshops with your board, photography days and launch events need a local partner or a local person managing one.
- When the content changes daily with your marketing team. A team in your time zone, or one of your own, serves that better than a project.
Questions people ask
How much does it cost to outsource web development to India?
About £1,800 to £4,400 for a custom business site of eight to fifteen pages with a CMS, £4,400 to £10,600 for a marketing site with a design system and a blog, £1,800 to £17,700 for an online store depending on the platform, and £3,500 to £31,000 for a web app. In dollars, roughly $2,400 to $6,000, $6,000 to $14,300, $2,400 to $23,800 and $4,800 to $41,700. The worked estimate above, a ten-page site with a CMS, is about £3,700 or $5,000.
Is it cheaper to build a website in India than in the UK?
For anything beyond a brochure site, yes, by two to four times against a UK freelancer and four to eight times against a UK agency on the same number of days. For a five-page brochure site the saving is small, because a UK freelancer charges £1,500 to £3,000 and the same pages built properly in India cost about £2,650, before your own coordination time.
Is it cheaper than the US?
By more. The same 28 days that cost about $5,000 in India cost $16,800 to $33,600 with a US freelancer at $75 to $150 an hour and $28,000 to $44,800 with a US agency. The time zone gap is wider than the UK's, so the overlap has to be planned rather than assumed.
Why is a small website not much cheaper offshore?
Because the fixed costs of working with any outside team, the brief, the content, the reviews and the questions, are the same for five pages as for forty, and on a small site they are most of the project. The hourly saving only becomes visible once the design and build run past a couple of weeks.
What do I still have to do myself?
Supply the content and photographs, own the domain and hosting accounts, and make sure the site meets the law where you are: company details and cookie rules in the UK, accessibility and state privacy law in the US. A good offshore team builds all of that in, but the obligations are yours.
Do I pay VAT or Indian tax on the invoice?
No Indian tax: exported services are zero-rated for GST. UK companies normally account for VAT under the reverse charge, which is neutral for most VAT-registered businesses, and US companies generally owe no sales tax on the service. Confirm with your own accountant.
How do time zones work for a website project?
For the UK, four to five hours of overlap every day; a review in your morning is built by your afternoon. For the US, a planned window in the early American morning, with design and content review happening asynchronously between calls. Website work suits this better than most projects.
Who owns the website and the accounts?
You do. The domain, hosting, analytics and CMS are registered in your name from the first day, and the code and designs are yours on final payment. Nothing should depend on the team continuing, and if a quote makes it otherwise, that is the answer to a different question.
Getting a real number
Ranges end where your site begins. Tell us what the site has to do, roughly how many pages, and whether it replaces an old one, and we will say honestly whether it is big enough to be worth building offshore. If it is not, we will tell you to hire locally. If it is, you get a fixed price in pounds or dollars after a short discovery. What we build is on our web and SaaS development page.