What does a website with Locomotive cost?

Treat that figure as a planning marker. A real quote comes once we understand your project. Below, we walk through what the budget pays for when you work with us, what pushes it up or down, and how we put an estimate together.

Looking for market-wide benchmarks, or tips for comparing proposals from several agencies? Our separate guide to creative agency website costs has you covered. For the full picture of what we do, see what Locomotive offers.

Whether it's a new site or a complete redesign, a typical project with us runs the full path from strategy to launch:

• Strategy and discovery: goals, audiences, priority journeys and a content plan your whole team signs off on.
• User experience: site structure, navigation and prototypes of the key journeys, tested before we lock the visual design.
• Original design: an art direction and a design system drawn for your brand from a blank page. No themes involved.
• Development: a front end and back end built to be fast, accessible and easy for your team to update.
• CMS setup: we pick the platform for your needs. We regularly work with Craft CMS, Sanity, Strapi, Contentful, DatoCMS and WordPress, among others.
• QA and launch: testing across browsers and devices, redirects that protect your search traffic, and training so your editors know their way around from day one.

The vast majority of the time, design and development happen in-house, with one team following the project from kickoff to launch. That's where a lot of the good ideas come from: designers and developers working through the same problem together. When a project calls for a specialized skill, we bring in trusted partners and build them into the plan.

Since 2008, this way of working has earned Locomotive more than 280 industry awards, including Awwwards Agency of the Year seven consecutive times, from 2018 to 2024. The trophies don't set the price, though. Your budget pays for the strategy, design, engineering and care your project needs.

Page count matters less than the work behind each page. Here's what moves our estimates the most.

What usually pushes the budget up

• More distinct templates and journeys. Fifty articles on one template cost far less than ten pages that each need their own layout.
• Several languages or markets. We work with clients worldwide, in English and French. A bilingual or multi-market site needs localized structures and more rounds of review.
• Integrations. Every connection to a CRM, e-commerce platform, search engine or marketing tool adds design, development and testing.
• A large content migration, plus the cleanup and redirects that come with it.
• Ambitious motion, 3D or WebGL. A subtle transition adds little. A real-time scene, like the interactive vehicle visit on the Scout Motors website, brings art direction, modelling, performance tuning and testing on real devices. We love 3D when it helps people understand a product or follow a story. When it doesn't, we'll suggest something simpler.

What usually brings it down

• A clear brief and a single decision-maker.
• Content that's ready, or a team that owns it.
• Fewer, more flexible templates.
• An existing brand identity that doesn't need rework.
• A phased approach: launch the essentials, then add features.

A focused online store like Mate Libre and an immersive automotive experience like Scout Motors are both custom sites. Their scopes simply live on different planets.

You can bring us in for a website, for branding, or for both. We also take on redesigns of existing sites. When a new brand identity is part of the project, the estimate grows with it, because strategy, identity and the design system come before the website design. Our guide to brand and website projects lays out the trade-offs.

After launch, we host, support and evolve the sites we build, so yours keeps improving instead of quietly aging. Plan for it in your site's total cost, and keep routine support separate from new design and development work. We don't offer standalone maintenance for sites we didn't build.

An estimate is only as good as the brief behind it. Before we put a number on anything, we want to understand:

• Your goals and the audiences the site has to serve.
• The page types, features and integrations you need.
• Where your content stands, and who writes, shoots and translates it.
• Whether it's a new site, a redesign, or a project that includes branding.
• Your target launch date and your budget range.

Sharing a budget range doesn't weaken your position. It lets us shape the right scope instead of guessing, and tell you early if a phased approach would serve you better. Our guide on how to write a website brief can help you get ready.

Time and budget travel together. To see how a project unfolds once it's underway, read how long a website project with Locomotive takes. And when your brief is ready, we'd love to read it.