Nobody wants to open with money.
So founders ask about timelines, process, availability, past clients — and then flinch when the number finally arrives. Three calls in, both sides find out they were never in the same range.
Let me just say the numbers.
The three ways this gets bought
Almost every Framer engagement lands in one of three shapes, and the shape matters more than the rate.
Fixed project. You know what you want. A launch page, a rebuild, a marketing site with a CMS behind it. Scope is knowable, so price is knowable.
Retainer. The site is alive. Pages get added, campaigns need landers, positioning shifts every quarter. You are not buying a deliverable, you are buying capacity and continuity.
Hourly. Someone is filling gaps. It works for small, unpredictable tasks, and it is the worst structure for anything strategic.
Most founders ask for hourly because it feels safe. It usually is not, and I will get to why.
What projects actually cost
These are the ranges the European and US startup market is paying in 2026 for someone experienced. Not a template flipper — someone who can handle positioning, structure, motion, CMS, and performance without supervision.
Treat them as the shape of the market, not as a quote. Every one of these numbers moves depending on the three things in the next section.
Launch page or single-page site: €2,000 – €5,000. One page, tight narrative, a form or waitlist, clean responsive behavior. If the copy is already solid this is a two-week job.
Full marketing site: €6,000 – €15,000. Five to eight pages, a CMS for blog or case studies, a reusable section system, SEO basics done properly. This is where most funded startups land.
Complex build: €15,000 – €35,000+. Custom code components, localization, product-like interactions, integrations with a CRM or app, migration off an old stack. The number goes up because the judgment calls go up, not because there are more pages.
Retainer: €3,000 – €8,000 per month. Ongoing design and build capacity. Usually the best value for a company shipping continuously, and the structure I prefer.
Hourly: €80 – €200. Wide range because the label "Framer expert" covers everything from a confident template user to someone who can argue with your engineers about bundle size.
If a quote comes in dramatically under these, that is information. Not disqualifying information — but information.
What actually moves the price
It is rarely page count.
Copy readiness. If the messaging is not decided, the site cannot be. Half of every "design" project is really a positioning project wearing a costume. If I have to help you find the words, that is real work and it takes real time.
Motion ambition. Restrained motion is cheap. Choreographed, scroll-driven, state-aware motion that still runs at sixty frames on a mid-range Android is not.
Where Framer stops. Some things belong in a code component. Some things belong outside Framer entirely. Knowing which is which is the skill you are paying for, and building the wrong one is how budgets die.
Handover expectations. A site your team can edit fearlessly costs more to build than a site only its author understands. It costs much less to own.
Speed. Compressing six weeks into two has a price. It always has.
Why the cheap quote is the expensive one
The €900 marketing site is real. You can buy it today. Here is what you generally get.
A template with your logo dropped in. Layouts that hold together until someone writes a headline longer than the placeholder. Animation applied uniformly because applying it uniformly is faster than deciding where it helps. No CMS structure, so every blog post becomes a manual page. Images shipped at full resolution because nobody checked. And a homepage that describes the company in language only the company understands.
Then you go to edit it, and you cannot, because the structure has no logic to it. So you hire someone to fix it. That person quotes you close to full price, because untangling someone else's decisions is slower than making your own.
The cheap site is not a site. It is a deposit on the real one.
I am not arguing that expensive equals good — plenty of costly work is just as ornamental. The filter is not price. The filter is whether the person can explain why the page is shaped the way it is. If the answer is about the reader's decision sequence, you are in good hands. If the answer is about what looks modern, you are buying decoration.
What the money should buy you
A site that survives contact with reality:
Real copy in real containers, not lorem ipsum in perfect boxes. Breakpoints that were considered from the first hour rather than patched in the last. A CMS your marketer can actually use. Motion that helps someone orient, not motion that makes them wait. Metadata, sitemap, and canonical tags handled without being asked. And a clear line, written down, between what lives in Framer and what does not.
That last one is the tell of an experienced hire. Anyone who tells you Framer can do everything has either not pushed it hard enough or is not being straight with you.
Why I do not sell hours
Tracking time is friction, and friction is the thing I get paid to remove.
Hourly billing also pays for the wrong behavior. It rewards the slowest path. It makes every good conversation feel like it costs money, so clients stop having them. And it turns the relationship adversarial at exactly the moment it should be collaborative — the moment when someone needs to say "the thing we agreed on last week is wrong, let's change it."
Retainers fix that. You get a predictable number. I get room to make the right call instead of the billable one. Nobody watches a clock.
That structure is not right for everyone. If your need is genuinely one-off, take a fixed project and be happy. But if the site is going to keep moving — and for a startup it always keeps moving — the retainer is cheaper by the second quarter.
Before you ask for a quote
Have three things ready and you will get a much better number.
Know what the page is for. "Get demos booked" and "look credible to investors" produce different sites. Say which one.
Know who is writing the copy. If the answer is nobody, say so — it changes the scope honestly instead of expensively.
Know what happens after launch. Who edits it. How often. That single answer changes the entire architecture.
FAQ
Is a Framer expert cheaper than a web agency?
Usually, yes — an agency carries account management, project management, and overhead you may not need. The trade is capacity. One person has a ceiling. I wrote about that trade-off in Framer Expert, Agency, or In-House.
How long does a Framer marketing site take?
A focused launch page, one to two weeks. A full marketing site with a CMS, three to six weeks. The variable is almost never the building. It is how long it takes to settle the message.
Should I pay a deposit?
Yes, and expect to. Half up front is standard for project work, and retainers bill monthly in advance. Anyone who does not ask for one has been burned less than they should have been.
What if I already have a site and just want it fixed?
Say that clearly. Fixing is sometimes cheaper and sometimes much more expensive than rebuilding, and an honest answer takes about twenty minutes of looking.
If you want a number for your specific situation rather than a range, tell me what you are building. If you are still working out who to hire, start with How to Hire a Framer Expert Without Paying for Pretty Screenshots.
