Page builder or a coded website: costs, editing and upkeep
A page builder costs you a monthly subscription and your own hours. A coded site from us is priced by step: EUR 600 to 900 for a single-page landing (step 01), EUR 900 to 1.500 for a two or three page mini-site (step 02), and EUR 1.500 to 3.500 for a business website of four to seven pages with a CMS (step 03).
If your site is a handful of pages, a contact form and some photographs, and nobody in your company is blocked when it goes a while without a change, the builder is the right answer and you can stop reading here. The rest of this page is about the point where that stops being true, and about a question worth asking out loud: who can edit what afterwards.
The case for the page builder, made properly
A builder sells you finished decisions. Someone else already chose the spacing, the breakpoints, the form handling, the image compression and the hosting, and you get all of it for a subscription. You can publish a page on a Sunday night without sending anyone an email or waiting for a quote.
The second thing a builder gives you is reversibility. You can change your mind about an entire layout at eleven at night and it costs you an evening, not an invoice. A coded site does not work that way, and pretending otherwise is how studios sell work nobody needed.
Where the builder stops being the cheap option
Four things break that trade, and none of them are about looks.
- The site has to do something. A login, a dashboard, a connection into the system you run bookings or stock on, a CRM that has to know about the enquiry, or taking money. That is step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500, and a builder reaches it only through a plugin whose future you do not control.
- Someone other than you has to edit it. Safely, without being able to drag a column into the wrong place and break a page for every visitor.
- The page count is climbing. Every new service page is a manual copy of the last one, with a typo nobody notices.
- The design has to be yours. Templates are recognisable, and the clients you most want are the ones who recognise them.
What the coded route actually is
A coded site is a set of pages built from your own components, with words and images held in a CMS. The design is drawn around your content instead of poured into a template somebody else drew. Pages that repeat, a service page, a case study, a location page, come from one template filled by the CMS, so the tenth costs almost nothing to add and cannot drift out of shape. More on how that work is done sits on design and engineering and on Next.js development in Amsterdam.
Who can edit what
| Task | Page builder | Coded site with a CMS |
|---|---|---|
| Change a headline or a paragraph | You, on the page | You, in a content field |
| Swap a photograph | You | You |
| Publish a blog post | You | You |
| Add another service page | You, by duplicating one | You, if that page type exists |
| Invent a new kind of page | You, and it will look it | Us, scoped and quoted |
| Move a section or change a layout | You, and you can break it | Us |
| Add a login, a dashboard or payments | A plugin, and its future | Us, as an add-on |
| Take the whole thing elsewhere | Limited. An export is not the whole site | Yours already: code, repository, database |
Read that table in both directions. The builder column says you can do more, and it also says you can break more, and that anyone with the password can do everything you can. The coded column is narrower on purpose. A CMS field can hold the wrong words. It cannot hold a broken layout.
Maintenance, and what it costs
On a builder the platform maintains itself. There is nothing to patch, and that is a real advantage worth saying plainly. In exchange, the vendor changes the editor, the plan and the feature list on their schedule and you follow. Your maintenance cost is your own time.
On a coded site, dependencies need updating, hosting needs watching and backups need to exist. That is Care, EUR 100 to 300 a month: updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. It is deliberately not a redesign and not new features. When you want a new page type or a new section, that is scoped and quoted like any other work, so the monthly fee stays a monthly fee.
Search sits on its own line, and it applies to either route. SEO foundation is bought once, EUR 450 to 750: Search Console, analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles, internal links and a three to six month plan. SEO growth, EUR 500 to 800 a month, is the ongoing version, and it is only worth starting once the foundation exists.
Process and timeline
Scoping comes first and produces a fixed quote, so the number you agree is the number you pay. After that the week ranges are the ones on packages: 1 to 2 weeks for step 01, 2 to 3 weeks for step 02, 3 to 6 weeks for step 03, and 6 to 12 weeks for step 04.
One warning about those ranges. The build is ours, the words and the photographs are yours, and this is the part that waits on you. If your copy is not written when the design is ready, the calendar stops.
When to spend less
Stay on the builder if the site is doing its job and the only complaint is that it could look better. Looking better is worth paying for when the site is where someone decides whether to trust you with real money, and it is not worth paying for otherwise.
If you do want to move, the smallest honest version is step 01: one page, built properly, with a form and analytics, EUR 600 to 900. The rest, such as an extra page at EUR 150 to 250, can be added later as add-ons against the same design rather than thrown away, and the quote confirms the scope.
And if somebody told you page builders are bad for search, be careful. A thin, slow coded site performs like a thin, slow builder site.
Common questions
Can I still edit a coded site myself?
Yes. Text, images, prices, posts and any page of a type that already exists are yours to change in the CMS. What you cannot do is rearrange the layout, and that is the point rather than a limitation. A genuinely new kind of page is a small piece of scoped work.
What happens if we stop working together?
The code, the repository and the database are yours, and another developer can pick them up. Hosting we can provide, agreed per project and settled in the quote rather than assumed.
Is a coded site faster than a builder site?
It can be, because we control what loads and when. Speed is an outcome of decisions though, not of the word coded. A custom site carrying four unoptimised hero videos will lose to a tidy builder page.
Can we start on a builder and move later?
Yes, and it is a sensible order. Your content transfers, your design does not, so treat the builder version as a way to find out which pages people actually use. Keep your URLs stable, which makes the redirects boring later instead of expensive.
How do I know which step I need?
Count what the site has to do, not how it should look. Pages, a form and analytics put you in step 01 to step 03 depending on page count. Anything with a login, a dashboard, an API, a CRM, a chatbot or payments is step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500.
Tell us what the site has to do and roughly when you need it, and we will tell you which step it is and what it costs. Start here.
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JP Studio designs and builds websites, storefronts and product interfaces.