What a website actually costs in Kenya
Real price bands for a business website in Kenya, what moves a quote up or down, and the costs that only appear after you have paid.
Nobody publishes prices, so every enquiry starts with a guess. Here is the range as it actually sits in Nairobi, and — more usefully — what moves a quote from one band to the next.
| Who builds it | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| You, on a template | KES 0 – 30,000 | A Wix or Squarespace site plus a subscription you keep paying. Fine for a holding page. |
| Freelancer | KES 25,000 – 80,000 | Usually a WordPress theme, lightly customised. Quality swings enormously. |
| Studio | KES 80,000 – 350,000 | Designed rather than assembled, written for your business, built to load fast. |
| Full agency | KES 400,000+ | Account manager, strategy deck, longer timeline. Priced for corporates. |
Those bands overlap because the page count is rarely what drives the price. Four things do.
What actually moves the number
- Whether the words already exist. Writing your services, your process and your about page from scratch is a real chunk of the work, and it is the part most quotes quietly assume you will supply.
- Whether you have photographs. Stock images of other people's premises are the fastest way to look like everyone else. A shoot costs money; not having one costs enquiries.
- Whether anything has to talk to something else. A contact form is trivial. Payments, bookings, stock, or a login are not — that is software, and it is priced as software.
- How many people have to approve it. Every additional decision-maker adds a revision round, and revision rounds are the single most common reason a fixed quote turns into an hourly one.
The costs that appear afterwards
A build price is not a total. Budget for these separately, because a quote that omits them is not cheaper — it is just incomplete.
| Item | Typical | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | KES 1,000 – 1,500 / year | A .co.ke through a KeNIC-accredited registrar. A .com runs a little more. |
| Hosting | KES 0 – 15,000 / year | A modern static site can genuinely host for nothing. WordPress cannot — it needs a server. |
| SSL certificate | KES 0 | Free and automatic on any competent host. If you are being charged for one, ask why. |
| Maintenance | KES 0 – 60,000 / year | WordPress needs patching or it gets hacked. A static site has nothing to patch. |
What to ask before you pay a deposit
- 01Is this a fixed price or an estimate? Get the answer in writing.
- 02How many revision rounds are included, and what does a further round cost?
- 03Who owns the domain and the hosting account — you, or the person building it?
- 04What happens if I want to move to someone else in a year?
- 05Will you show me the site on a phone before we launch?
The last one matters more than it sounds. Most Kenyan traffic is mobile, on a mid-range Android, over data the visitor is paying for by the megabyte. A site that was only ever reviewed on a laptop is a site nobody has actually seen.