Ask three agencies in Douala what a website costs and you will get three answers, none of them a number. It is a frustrating way to plan a budget, and it pushes people towards whoever quotes lowest — which is rarely the cheapest outcome once the year is over.
So here are our actual ranges, what moves a project from one band to the next, and the things quotes routinely leave out.
The short answer
| What you need | Realistic range (XAF) | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Landing page (one page, one goal) | 150,000 – 400,000 | 1 – 2 weeks |
| Business website (5 – 10 pages) | 400,000 – 800,000 | 2 – 4 weeks |
| E-commerce store | 800,000 – 3,000,000 | 4 – 10 weeks |
| Web application or SaaS | 1,000,000 – 5,000,000 | 6 – 16 weeks |
| School or hospital management system | 2,000,000 – 8,000,000 | 10 – 20 weeks |
Those are starting points, not quotes. What follows is what actually decides where in the range you land.
What genuinely drives the price
1. How much of it is bespoke
A brochure site built on a well-trodden pattern is mostly assembly. A booking flow that has to check availability across three locations, hold a slot for ten minutes and release it if payment fails is engineering. The visible page count is a poor guide to cost; the number of rules behind it is a good one.
2. Whether money moves through it
The moment a site takes payment, the standard rises. Failed payments have to be handled, webhooks arrive out of order and sometimes twice, and a customer who has been debited but sees no confirmation will phone you, not your developer. Mobile Money integration is not difficult, but doing it so that it never double-charges and never loses an order takes real care.
3. Who writes the content
This is the single most common reason projects run late in our experience, and it rarely appears in a quote. If you supply the text and photographs, you pay for a website. If the agency writes the copy, sources the images and structures the pages around what you actually sell, you are also paying for a small marketing project. Both are legitimate — just be clear which one you are buying.
4. What happens after launch
A website is not a delivery, it is a thing that runs. Hosting, TLS certificates, backups, dependency updates and the occasional fix all continue after handover. Ask specifically what is included and for how long.
What cheap quotes leave out
A 100,000 XAF website is not a lie, but it is usually a different product than the one you are imagining. In our experience the gap is made up of these:
- Mobile. Over 80% of Cameroonian traffic is on a phone, often on a slow connection. A layout that only works on a laptop is not finished.
- Speed. Uncompressed images and heavy page builders produce sites that take ten seconds to load on 3G. Visitors leave well before that.
- Search. Page titles, descriptions, structured data and a sitemap. Without them you have a brochure nobody will find.
- Ownership. Who holds the domain and the hosting account? If the answer is the agency, you are renting your own address.
- A working contact route. We have audited sites whose contact form silently failed for months. Every enquiry vanished, and nobody knew.
The expensive website is the one you pay for twice.
How to compare two quotes fairly
Price alone tells you very little. These five questions separate quotes that look similar:
- 1Who owns the domain and hosting account? It should be you, in your name, with your billing details.
- 2What exactly is in the handover? Source code, database, image assets, admin credentials.
- 3What is the support period, and what counts as support? Fixing a defect is support. A new feature is not.
- 4Who writes the content? Get this in writing before work starts.
- 5What happens if we need changes after launch? An hourly rate agreed now beats a negotiation later.
Is a cheap template ever the right answer?
Yes, and we will say so when it is. If you need a presence this month so that customers can find your phone number and opening hours, a well-built single page for 200,000 XAF is a sound decision. Spending 2,000,000 XAF on a platform before you know what your customers do is not.
The mistake is not starting small. It is building something you outgrow in four months on foundations that cannot be extended, and paying for the whole thing again.
How we quote
We work to a fixed price against a written scope, split 40% to start and 60% on delivery. Work outside that scope is quoted separately before it is carried out, so an invoice never contains a surprise. If your budget will not stretch to what you have described, we would rather tell you at the first conversation and propose a smaller first phase.
Tell us what you are trying to build and we will send a written proposal within 24 to 48 hours — including the parts you have not thought of yet.
Get a proposal