The honest answer is that it depends, and anyone who quotes you a single number before understanding your project is guessing. Across Kenyan agencies in 2026, a website runs anywhere from about KES 15,000 for a simple template site to well past KES 500,000 for a custom platform. Here is the real breakdown, so you know what you are paying for and where the money goes.

The four levels of website

Almost every project falls into one of four buckets. Find yours before you talk to anyone.

1. Landing or basic site: KES 15,000 to 50,000

A few pages on a customised template: home, about, services, contact. Mobile responsive, a working contact form, and the basics of SEO. Perfect for a new business that needs a clean, credible presence fast. What you usually will not get here is custom design, a blog, or advanced features.

2. Business website: KES 50,000 to 150,000

This is where most Kenyan SMEs should live. Custom design built around your brand, five to fifteen pages, a blog or news section, analytics, on-page SEO, and lead-capture forms, all on a content system you can edit yourself. Expect two to four weeks of work. The KES 80,000 to 120,000 band is the sweet spot: real quality, without paying for enterprise features you will never use.

3. E-commerce: KES 100,000 to 500,000

Selling online adds real complexity: a product catalogue, a cart, payments with M-Pesa as a must and cards optional, order management, inventory, and delivery logic. A solid WooCommerce store starts around KES 100,000 to 150,000. A fully custom shop with heavy integrations climbs toward KES 300,000 to 500,000 and beyond.

4. Custom builds and web apps: KES 500,000 and up

Booking systems, member portals, dashboards, marketplaces, and SaaS products. These are custom-coded, properly tested, and built to scale, so they are priced per project once the scope is mapped. If you need one, you already know it.

The costs almost everyone forgets

The build is a one-off. Running the site is ongoing, and a good developer tells you this up front:

Domain: KES 1,000 to 3,000 a year.
Hosting: KES 3,000 to 30,000 a year, depending on traffic and needs.
SSL certificate: KES 5,000 to 15,000 a year, often bundled.
Business email: KES 500 to 2,000 per user a year.
Maintenance: KES 5,000 to 20,000 a month for updates, backups, and someone on call.

The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest website. A site with no maintenance and slow hosting costs you in lost customers, not in invoices.

What actually moves the price

Two websites with the same page count can differ by a factor of ten. The real drivers are how much is custom-designed versus templated, the features you need, who builds it, how much content and SEO work is included, and whether it is built for you to edit or locked to the developer.

How to get real value

Get a fixed scope and a fixed quote in writing before anyone starts. Ask to edit your own content without a developer. Make sure the site loads fast and is built to be found on search. And pick someone who will still be around when you need a change in six months.

That is how I build: fast, modern sites on a stack you can edit yourself, with a fixed quote up front and no surprises. If you are weighing a project, see the packages and get a quote here.