What a website costs in Moldova, and why quotes range from €50 to €5000

Ask five studios in Chisinau today for a quote on “a five-page business website” and the answers land between €50 and €2500. Not because some are greedy and others generous, but because “what does a website cost” is as imprecise as “what does a car cost”.

A website has four components that can each be bought separately, or not at all: design (an off-the-shelf theme, or drawn for you), copy (yours, or a writer's), the technical layer (speed, SEO, security), and what happens after launch (who fixes it, who updates it, who answers). The price mostly tells you how many of those four are included.

What follows are the real price levels on the Moldovan market in 2026, with what each includes and what it does not. These are not our prices — they are the market's. Ours come at the end, so you can compare.

At this level you are buying assembly time, not creation. A WordPress theme or a builder like Tilda is taken, the logo, colours and photos are swapped, and the text you send is pasted in. In 2–5 days the site is live.

What you get: a page that looks decent on a phone, a contact form, a connected domain.

What you do not get: copy written for your business (you are asked for it), a design that does not resemble fifty other sites, speed optimisation, or a structure planned around Google. The theme ships with dozens of features you never use and that slow it down.

When this is the right choice: you need a presence so you look legitimate, your clients come from referrals or Instagram, and the site is a business card. If that is your situation, do not pay more. You genuinely do not need to.

Still a theme, but chosen more carefully and modified more seriously: a page structure fitted to your services, sometimes a stock photo pack, sometimes help rewriting your text. Typical timeline: 1–2 weeks.

What is added: the site no longer looks exactly like the theme demo, the structure reflects what you sell, and there is a minimum of SEO configuration (titles, descriptions, a sitemap).

What is still missing: the speed is the theme's speed, which is usually poor on mobile. The copy is tidied rather than written strategically. There is no keyword thinking — nobody has looked at what your customers actually search for.

The trap at this level: many quotes here include “SEO”. Check what that means. Most often it means filling in the title and description fields in the Yoast plugin, which takes twenty minutes and will not put you in search results.

Here the nature of the work changes. The starting point is not a theme but your business: who the customers are, what they search for, what stops them buying. The design is drawn, the copy is written, the structure is built around the keywords that bring enquiries.

What you get: a unique design, copy from someone who understood what you sell, load times under 2 seconds, structured data for Google, a sitemap, language versions where relevant, and — importantly — the source code, so you are not locked to one supplier.

Timeline: 2–6 weeks, depending on page count and how quickly information and photos come back from you.

When it is worth it: when the site has to produce enquiries rather than merely exist. If you depend on Google for new clients, the difference between €150 and €800 pays for itself in the first two or three contracts. If you do not depend on Google, perhaps it does not.

Above €1500 you stop paying for pages and start paying for what the pages do. An online store with payments and stock sync. Customer accounts with order history. Forms that create a CRM lead automatically. Price calculators. Bookings tied to a calendar. Integration with accounting software or 1C.

What drives the price here: the number of integrations and how badly documented the systems are that you have to talk to. A store with Stripe and standard delivery is predictable. The same store that must sync with an old inventory program with no API can cost double, because half the work is making two systems understand each other.

The signal that you need this level: you already have a process that is done by hand and hurts — someone copies orders from one place to another, someone answers the same question twenty times a day, someone tracks stock in a spreadsheet that occasionally goes missing.

Hosting and domain. €20–€150 a year for an ordinary site. Some agencies include the first year and then the invoice arrives. Ask up front.

Maintenance. A WordPress site with ten plugins needs monthly updates or it becomes a way in. €50–€300 a month if you pay for it, a few hours of your own time if you do not.

Copy and photography. If they are not included, you produce them. Realistically that is 10–20 hours of work for a five-page site, and projects sit stalled for months at exactly this point.

Changes afterwards. Before signing, ask what a change costs after launch and whether you receive the source code. The difference between “the code is yours” and “the site stays with us” is the difference between a supplier and a dependency.

The right question is not “what does a website cost” but “where do the next 10 clients come from”. If the answer is referrals, a €150 site is enough and the rest of the money is better spent elsewhere. If the answer is Google, then a site not built for search is wasted money however cheap it was.

The most expensive mistake we see is not overpaying. It is paying twice: €200 for a site that brings nothing, then another €1000 a year later to rebuild it from scratch, plus the year lost. If you already know you need search traffic, skip the first step.

At ARTYONIX a landing page starts at €490 and ships in 7 business days, a business website at €1200, an online store at €2500, and a custom platform at €3500. All include original design, copy, technical SEO, SSL, first-year hosting, and the source code handed over. We are not the cheapest option in Moldova and are not trying to be — we are the option that makes sense when the site has to generate enquiries. Our calculator gives you an estimate in 30 seconds without asking for contact details.