Getting a website built in the Philippines in mid-2026 costs anywhere from around ₱500 a month on a DIY builder to roughly ₱10,000–₱60,000 for a freelancer build, ₱50,000–₱300,000 at a small studio, and ₱300,000 up into seven figures at a larger agency. The spread is that wide because there is no going rate for “a website.” The price is set by what the site has to do, and the honest way to read the market is as four build routes, each with its own band.
Every figure in this post is a range on purpose. Quotes for work that sounds identical on paper differ by an order of magnitude here, and most of what follows is about why. The bands were compiled from published Philippine price lists and official platform pricing in July 2026 (there is a note on method near the end), so treat them as bearings to check a quote against, not as quotes. alapaap’s own numbers are not estimates and are further down.
What each build route costs
A Philippine small business weighing a website is really weighing four routes. The bands below are what those routes cost in the current market.
| Route | Rough cost, mid-2026 | What you get | The tradeoff |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.com) | ₱500–₱4,500 a month, plus a domain | A template site you assemble yourself, live in days | You rent the platform and inherit its ceilings, and the build time is yours |
| Freelancer | ₱10,000–₱60,000, one time | A small brochure or business site, quality tracking the person’s experience | Continuity: hosting, maintenance, and the next change are on you |
| Small studio | ₱50,000–₱300,000, one time | A custom design and build with a process behind it | The widest spread in the market; scope decides where in the band you land |
| Larger agency | ₱300,000 to ₱3M+ | Discovery, a team, enterprise integration | Priced per project; more machine than a small site needs |
On the builder route, the useful paid tiers (custom domain, no platform ads) run roughly ₱500–₱2,000 a month across Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.com, with commerce tiers pushing toward ₱4,500. Two things to know before comparing that against a build quote. Most of these platforms price in US dollars (Shopify, for one, bills Philippine merchants in USD outright), so the peso figure moves with the exchange rate. And the free tiers are real but carry the platform’s subdomain and its ads, which is fine for testing and wrong for a business.
The freelancer band is the market’s true budget lane. Published Philippine rate guides put a small brochure site at roughly ₱8,000–₱25,000 from a newer developer and ₱25,000–₱60,000 from an experienced one, with hourly rates quoted anywhere from ₱200 to ₱2,000. The variance is the person. A good freelancer at ₱40,000 can out-deliver a mediocre agency at four times the price; what you are pricing is continuity, because when the person moves on, so does everything they knew about your site.
Small studios and boutique agencies cover the widest stretch. At the bottom, package shops advertise sites from around ₱10,000, almost always with a required monthly fee of ₱700–₱3,600 that bundles hosting, maintenance, and revisions. Compare those against one-time quotes carefully, because the monthly line is the actual price. Serious custom work, with design from scratch and the technical foundations done properly, mostly lands between ₱75,000 and ₱300,000.
Above that, larger agencies rarely publish pricing at all. Secondhand estimates for corporate builds run from ₱300,000 to well past ₱3 million for portals and heavy e-commerce. If you are reading this post to budget, that tier is probably not your question.
What actually moves the number
Within any route, the biggest lever is what the site has to do. A five-page brochure site, the pages that say who you are, what you sell, and how to contact you, is the cheapest thing on the menu at every tier. Booking flows, member areas, and payment collection add integration work and sit in the middle. Full e-commerce adds a catalog, payment and shipping logic, and order management, and can roughly double a quote against the brochure version of the same business.
The second lever is template versus custom design. A template restyled with your logo and colors is fast and cheap; design actually drawn for your business costs real hours, and it is most of the gap between the bottom and middle of the studio band. The third lever is quieter: content. Someone has to write every page, and if that someone is the builder, it is in the price. Quotes that assume you will hand over finished text and photography are cheaper on paper and slower in practice, because the content is usually what stalls.
One-time versus ongoing: the three-year view
The comparison that decides value is not this month’s price but the total over two or three years, plus what you own at the end. We made the longer version of this argument in the Wix comparison: a builder subscription is renting, and a build you own is an asset.
Run the arithmetic on the same two or three years:
| Route | Up front | Ongoing, three years | Rough three-year total | Yours at the end? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | ₱0 | ₱36,000–₱72,000 subscription, plus ₱1,800–₱4,800 domain | ≈ ₱38,000–₱77,000 | No; the site stops with the subscription |
| Freelancer | ₱10,000–₱60,000 | ₱1,800–₱22,800 domain and hosting | ≈ ₱12,000–₱83,000 | Yes; upkeep is on you |
| Small studio | ₱50,000–₱300,000 | ₱1,800–₱22,800 domain and hosting | ≈ ₱52,000–₱323,000 | Yes |
| Larger agency | ₱300,000–₱3M+ | Same recurring costs, often bundled into a retainer | Scoped per project | Yes |
The assumptions behind the table: a mid-tier builder plan at ₱1,000–₱2,000 a month, a .com domain at ₱600–₱1,600 a year, and shared hosting at ₱1,000–₱6,000 a year at renewal rates. Read renewal prices, not first-year promos. A static or server-rendered site on a modern host is often free at the traffic a small-business site sees, which is where the low ends come from. Maintenance sits outside the table on purpose: published Philippine retainers run anywhere from ₱2,000 to ₱25,000 and up a month depending on scope, too wide a spread to average, and plenty of small sites need none for long stretches.
That arithmetic does not automatically favor the build. If the site only needs to exist, show your hours, and give people a way to write to you, three years of builder subscription is cheaper than most custom quotes and comes with zero maintenance decisions. The build starts winning when the site is meant to bring in customers, because then its speed, search visibility, and payment options are earning assets, and those are the things a rented platform caps.
The Philippine specifics
If the site takes money, plan for local rails. GCash and Maya are how customers here pay, and the practical route in is a gateway like PayMongo or Xendit, or Maya Business directly. The fee model is friendlier than most owners expect: no setup fees, pay per transaction. As of mid-2026, published rates run roughly 1–3% per transaction for the e-wallets and 3–4.5% plus a small flat fee for cards. What you are pricing in the build is the integration work itself, and whether your platform supports the local gateways cleanly, which is a common place builder platforms run out of road.
Domains have a local wrinkle too. A .ph address is a real signal for a local business and carries a premium: ₱2,600–₱4,300 a year against ₱600–₱1,600 for a .com. Registrars have been repricing .ph upward with the exchange rate, since the registry’s costs are dollar-denominated, so budget for drift.
And plan for phones. Most of your customers will arrive on a mid-range Android over mobile data, not a desktop on fiber. How fast the site loads on that connection is a spec, and it is part of what separates a ₱150,000 build from a ₱15,000 one that looks the same in a desktop screenshot.
The costs that don’t show up in the quote
Four costs surprise owners after the invoice. The redesign cycle: template sites age visibly, and three years in, the refresh becomes a line item nobody budgeted. The price of leaving: on a builder platform you cannot take the site with you, so switching means rebuilding from zero, the ownership tradeoff the Wix comparison walks through in detail. Revisions: most quotes include a bounded number of rounds, and content rewrites past that are billable.
The fourth is the big one. “A website” and “a website that gets found” are different line items, and most quotes at every tier cover only the first. Search visibility is ongoing work, not a launch feature, and if a quote says “SEO included,” it usually means meta tags and a sitemap, not the months of content and technical work that ranking against real competitors takes. Ask what specifically is included, and treat the answer as part of the price comparison.
How these ranges were put together
We compiled the bands above in July 2026 from sources you can check: published price lists of Philippine studios and package shops, official pricing pages of the builder platforms and payment providers, and Philippine freelancer rate guides, with dollar-priced items converted at around ₱61.5 to the dollar. Where sources disagreed, we left the range wide rather than average it. Everything here is accurate as of mid-2026, and the builder subscriptions and anything tied to the exchange rate will drift first. Use the bands to sanity-check a quote, not to predict your project’s exact number.
Where alapaap sits
alapaap publishes exact numbers instead of “request a quote”: engagements run from ₱50,000 for a standalone piece of work to ₱400,000 for the full build-and-get-found bundle, with each spec’s scope listed on the pricing page. Every build is custom, a codebase you own at handover rather than a template on a rented platform, which places the work in the studio band above. One lane is free by design: Philippine animal welfare organizations get a website, a Google Business Profile, and a donation flow at no cost, three organizations a year.
If you are still deciding what the site is for, which is the question that sets the price everywhere in this post, the websites service page describes how we scope that. And if you want a number for your situation, write to us with a sentence or two about what the site has to do. You will get an honest read, including “start on a builder” when that is the true answer.