Search for web developers in Varanasi and you will find offers starting at ₹3,000. You will also find quotes of ₹60,000 for what sounds like the same thing.

Both can be honest. Neither price tells you what you are buying — what actually moves the number is a separate question from who you should trust to do the work.

The gap is almost never the design. It is who owns the domain afterwards, what year two costs, and whether anyone answers the phone when a form stops sending. Those are the parts nobody puts on a pricing page, and they decide whether you are still glad about this in three years.

Here are the questions worth asking. Ask them of us too — we have answered each one below, including the answers that are not flattering.

1. Whose name is on the domain?

Your domain should be registered to you or your business, with you holding the login.

It is common here for a developer to register it on their own account “to make it easier”. It is easier — for them. It also means the address your customers type, the one printed on your board and your cards, belongs to somebody else. If the relationship ends badly, or the developer stops replying, you are negotiating for your own name.

Ask to be shown the registrar account with your name on it. Not a promise. The actual screen.

The same goes for hosting, the Google Business Profile, the ad account and the social pages. Each should be yours, with your recovery email and phone on it, and the developer added as a user you can remove.

2. What does year two cost?

A website has a build cost and a running cost. Usually only one gets quoted.

Running costs are the domain renewal, hosting, an SSL certificate, and whatever the site depends on — a payment gateway, a messaging service, a booking tool. Some are a few hundred rupees a year, some a few thousand. None are optional once you are live.

Ask for the yearly figure in writing before the build starts. Ask whether those services are billed to you directly or through the developer, and at what markup. Being charged at cost is normal. Being charged triple and not told is also normal, and is not fine.

3. Can I see something you built that is still running?

Not a screenshot. Not a template demo. A live address you can open on your phone right now, for a business that still exists.

Then check three things yourself:

  • Does it load quickly on mobile data, not office Wi-Fi?
  • Can you find the phone number in under five seconds?
  • Search the business name on Google. Does the site come up?

The last one matters more than it sounds. A site nobody can find is a brochure you paid to print and left in a drawer.

4. Who writes the words?

Most quotes cover design and development. Very few cover the writing, and clients usually discover this at the point where the site is finished except for the part that says what the business does.

If the words are your job, that is fine — but plan for it, because the project stops until they arrive. If they are the developer’s job, ask to see writing they have done for another client, and check it does not read like everyone else’s.

5. How long, and what stops the clock?

Timelines slip for a few predictable reasons: photographs that do not exist yet, text nobody has written, approvals waiting on someone who is travelling.

A useful answer names those. A less useful answer is a number with no conditions attached.

For reference, on our own work: a straightforward business site is usually 7 to 14 working days. An online store or something custom is 3 to 6 weeks. Both assume content arrives roughly when agreed, and neither is a promise we can keep if it does not.

6. What happens when something breaks at 8pm?

Websites break. A payment gateway changes something, an update goes badly, a certificate expires. The question is not whether, but what happens next.

Ask who you contact, on what number, and what a fix costs. Is there a monthly arrangement, or is each fix quoted? If there is a maintenance plan, ask what it actually includes — “support” on its own means nothing.

Then ask the question people forget: where are the backups, and how do I reach them without you? A backup only your developer can restore has a single point of failure attached.

7. What does the paperwork look like?

Ask what kind of business you are dealing with and what documents you will get — a quote, an invoice, and something in writing about who owns what at the end.

Our own position, since we are telling you to demand this: Solvey is a sole proprietorship and is not GST-registered. Our invoices carry no GST, so there is no input credit for you to claim. For most small businesses that is irrelevant. If you are a company that needs to claim credit on this spend, it matters, and you should know before you talk to us rather than after.

We would rather lose the enquiry than have that surface at invoice time.

8. What can you not do?

The most useful answer any developer gives you is an honest limit.

Anyone who says yes to everything has either not understood the job or intends to work it out on your budget. Real constraints exist, and a developer worth hiring knows theirs.

An example from our own work. Victors Home Tutors is a tuition bureau that sends adults into children’s homes, so verifying tutors could not be a feature added later. The obvious answer is to check a tutor’s Aadhaar. A private business in India cannot: the Supreme Court struck down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act in 2018, and with it the route that let private companies run Aadhaar authentication. Any vendor implying otherwise is selling something that does not exist.

So the answer was slower and less impressive. Accept any government ID, have a person review it against a photo of the applicant, and check each application against previous ones so somebody rejected once cannot quietly reapply under a new name. Then handle those ID photos under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which attaches real duties to holding them.

“We cannot do that, and here is what we can do instead” is the answer you want.

Where the price differences come from

Two quotes for “a website” can differ tenfold and both be fair, because they are different things.

A template site is a bought design with your text and photographs dropped in. Fast, cheap, and completely reasonable if you need a credible presence and a phone number. The limits appear when you want something the template did not anticipate.

A built site is laid out for your business specifically. Costs more, takes longer, worth it when the layout is doing a job — a product catalogue, a booking flow, an enquiry that has to reach you a particular way.

Something custom is software with a website attached. Vakil Prime is an advocate practising at the Varanasi District Court who takes work across six districts — Varanasi, Chandauli, Mirzapur, Ghazipur, Jaunpur and Bhadohi. That is not a template problem. Neither is matching parents to verified tutors by actual distance.

Most businesses need the first or the second. Being sold the third when you needed the first is the most expensive mistake in this market.

Who you are choosing between

The section above is about what you are buying. This one is about who from, because that is the comparison most people are actually making and almost nobody writes it down honestly.

A freelancer. Often the cheapest and the fastest, and for a straightforward site frequently the right answer. The risk is not skill, it is continuity: one person who stops replying leaves a site nobody else can edit, which is the single most common reason a business arrives here with an existing website and no logins to it. Ask who holds the files if they are unreachable for a month, and ask it before you pay a deposit.

A template shop or platform reseller. A bought design with your content placed into it, at a price nothing custom can match. Genuinely right when you need a credible presence and a phone number quickly. Two limits worth knowing in advance: the first time you want something the template did not anticipate the answer is usually a rebuild, and the design is not exclusive to you.

A practice that scopes before it builds. That is what we are, so read this with that in mind. The work starts with what the business has to achieve, the routes are priced before one is chosen, and the architecture is set against the budget rather than around a template’s limits — which is why a ₹9,999 site and a system a company runs its day on go through the same four steps. It is the wrong choice when you already know exactly what you want, it is small, and it will not change. Paying to scope a job that needs no scoping is waste, and we will say so.

A large network agency. A bigger bench, more people on call, and a recognised name on the invoice. Rates overlap with the upper end of ours rather than sitting above them, so the honest difference is not price but scale: choose this when you need volume, several markets at once, or people physically in your office.

Nobody is best in the abstract. The question that resolves it is how much of the problem you want to hand over: a freelancer executes a decision you have already made, a template shop sells you a decision already made by someone else, and a practice is worth paying only if the deciding is the part you actually need.

What we charge

So you can hold this against whatever else you are quoted: our business sites start at ₹9,999 and store-ready builds at ₹24,999. A logo with a starter kit starts at ₹4,999, a full identity system at ₹9,999. Custom work is priced after a call, because quoting it from a description would be a guess.

Those are starting points, not the price of your project. The full breakdown, including the third-party costs most quotes leave out until the invoice, is on our pricing page.

If you want to see how we approach a build before speaking to anyone, the detail is on website design and development in Varanasi, and the live client sites are in our portfolio.

The short version

Ask who owns the domain. Ask what year two costs. Open a site they built, on your phone, on mobile data. Ask what they cannot do.

Four questions, ten minutes, and you will know more than any proposal will tell you.