Ask three studios what a website costs and you'll get 49 EUR, 1,500 EUR, and 9,000 EUR. All three call it a "corporate website." None of them is lying — they're just selling different things under the same word.
The problem isn't that there's no price. It's that the price depends almost entirely on what sits behind the page you actually see. Let's take it apart honestly, without a single made-up number.
Why there is no single price
In Eastern Europe, web development runs roughly 25–60 EUR an hour, versus 75–150 EUR in Western Europe. So a website doesn't have "a price." It has a cost: hours × complexity × who builds it.
In Moldova in 2026 you'll see ads starting at 49 EUR and quotes that comfortably clear several thousand. The gap isn't the studio's margin. It's what's inside the package: a custom design or a bought template, who writes the copy, whether there's an admin you can actually edit, how many languages, which integrations, and who pays for hosting a year from now.
What actually moves the price
These are the real variables that decide the invoice:
- Scope. Five marketing pages are not the same as a store with a cart, online payment, and stock. Every new flow is code and testing.
- Custom vs. template. A 49 EUR WordPress template looks like ten thousand other sites and hits a wall the moment you need something it didn't anticipate. A custom design costs more today because someone is thinking it through for your business.
- Admin / CMS. "I'll edit it myself" sounds simple. In practice, a panel where a non-technical person genuinely adds products and articles without breaking anything is real work to build.
- Integrations. This is where the price jumps hardest. Online payment via MAIB, e-signature via M-Sign, a CRM, delivery — each is a separate connection with its own failure cases.
- Multilingual. RO/RU/EN isn't "translate the text." It's correct routing, hreflang, editable content per language. That's architecture, not copy-paste.
- SEO and GEO. To show up in Google and get cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity, you need structure: a sitemap, JSON-LD, a robots file that lets AI crawlers in, solid speed. It's built into the foundation, not bolted on at the end.
Why "cheap" usually costs more
The 49 EUR template is cheap right up to the day you need a feature it can't handle. Then you pay twice: once for the workarounds, again for rebuilding from scratch when the workarounds break.
There's also the part you won't see in the quote — who owns the code. Plenty of cheap offers leave you a tenant on your own website: no source code, no way to switch vendors, paying "maintenance" forever just so you're not left with nothing. The real cost isn't the number on the invoice. It's what it costs you to leave when you want to.
How to budget properly
Don't ask "what does a website cost." Ask differently:
- What does a visitor need to do on the site? (read, buy, book, sign)
- Which systems does it have to talk to? (payments, accounting, CRM)
- Who maintains it after launch, and on what stack?
- Do I get the source code at the end, or stay dependent?
Then set aside an operating budget. Hosting, domain, certificates, monitoring, and small tweaks are a recurring line, not a one-off. A good site is a multi-year investment, not a one-time purchase.
How we work at KERNEX
At KERNEX IT we build everything in-house, on Next.js 15 running on Cloudflare, multilingual via next-intl, with full SEO/GEO from the foundation — exactly what runs on our own site. We don't subcontract pieces we can't control.
We know where the price jumps because we've shipped the hard parts: online payment via MAIB for Pivoteka.md, the official M-Sign integration straight from the cash register UI for Datecs.md, and for Datero.md we operate a platform with 215,000+ indexed Moldovan companies. At the end, you get the source code. It's yours, not a rental.
If you want an honest estimate for your scope instead of a number pulled from thin air, write to us at hello@kernex.md and we'll start from what the product actually has to do.