"How much for a website?" is the single most common message we get, and it's a fair question with a genuinely unsatisfying honest answer: it depends. But "it depends" isn't useful to someone trying to budget, so here's an actual breakdown of what KES 12,000 — our basic 5-page package — gets you, and where the price climbs from there and why.
At this price point, you're not getting a custom illustrated design system, e-commerce functionality, a CMS you can freely edit yourself without asking, or ongoing content updates beyond the initial build. That's not a corner being cut — it's the honest scope of what 5 template-adjacent pages, built efficiently, actually cost in developer time. A basic site takes roughly 3 to 7 days of focused work; the price reflects that, not a discount version of a much bigger project.
E-commerce and M-Pesa integration (from ~KES 40,000): The jump here isn't arbitrary. A shop needs a product catalogue with inventory tracking, a cart, and a working payment flow — which, done properly, means the STK Push callback handling and reconciliation logic we wrote about separately. That's a genuinely different category of engineering from a static informational page, not just "more pages."
Custom design work: Template-adjacent design (using a strong, flexible base and customising it well) is fast. Fully custom visual identity — original illustration, a distinct layout language, animation work — takes meaningfully longer because it can't be reused or adapted from prior projects the way a solid template structure can.
Admin dashboards / self-editable content: If you want to log in and change your own prices, add products, or edit copy without messaging us every time, that requires building an actual admin interface with authentication and data management behind it — real additional engineering, not a toggle switch.
If your actual need is "I want to look credible when someone searches my business name," the KES 12,000 tier genuinely covers that — don't overpay for e-commerce infrastructure you won't use. If your need is "I want to stop losing sales to WhatsApp chaos" or "I need to sell online," that's a different, larger scope, and we'll tell you that honestly on the strategy call rather than upselling a basic package that won't actually solve your problem.