What a website costs in Switzerland, and why
Most studios will not tell you what a website costs until you have had a meeting. That is defensible, because the honest answer depends on what you need. It also leaves you unable to compare anything. Lutheis publishes its prices, so here is what sits behind them, and what to look for in anybody else's quote.
The short answer
A professionally designed and built website for a small Swiss business generally runs from a few thousand francs into the tens of thousands. That spread is mostly not about quality. It is about how much of the site is designed rather than assembled, what the site has to do, and who is responsible for it after it launches.
At Lutheis, a design from the collection is 3 000 €, a site designed from scratch around your brand is 5 000 €, and hosting and care is 49 € a month or 539 € a year. Those are complete build prices rather than starting points with the necessary parts removed.
Why the cheapest option is often not the cheapest
A template you fill in yourself costs almost nothing, and for some businesses it is genuinely the right answer. If your website is a business card that needs to exist so people can find your address, buy the template.
It stops being the right answer when the site has to sell something, rank for anything, or carry a brand that people are being asked to trust with money. At that point the cost moves out of the software and into the thinking: what the site is for, who it is speaking to, and what it needs to make easy. That part cannot be bought at any price, only done or not done.
What actually drives the price
Three things, in roughly this order of impact.
How much is designed rather than assembled. A design adapted from a collection and a design drawn from nothing are different amounts of work, which is why they are different prices rather than one price with a discount.
What the site has to do. A page that explains a service and a shop that takes payments, tracks stock and issues invoices are different products that happen to share a browser. Features that touch money or personal data cost more than features that do not, and they should.
Who carries it afterwards. This is the one most quotes are quietest about, and it is the one that decides what you actually pay over three years.
The recurring cost, where two quotes diverge most
Two studios can quote the same build price and mean entirely different things about what happens next. One hands over a folder of files and a list of accounts for you to open, pay for and keep alive. The other keeps the site running and answers when it breaks.
Every Lutheis site is hosted and maintained by the studio, at 49 € a month. That is the delivery model rather than an upsell: it covers the servers, the database, security updates, backups, the SSL certificate and fixing anything that worked at delivery and has stopped.
It used to be 29 € a month, and that was a mistake worth admitting. Each client site runs on its own database project and its own deployment, and at 29 € the hosting was priced below what it cost to provide. A price that loses money on every client is not a bargain for the client either, because it is not a price anybody can keep. It gets raised, or the service quietly degrades until it can be.
A piece of arithmetic worth stealing
The yearly plan is 539 €, which is eleven months rather than twelve. It would have been easy to make it ten and advertise two months free.
Here is why it is eleven. Prepaying a year does not save a studio the percentage a card processor takes, because that is charged on the money whenever it moves. It saves the fixed fee charged per transaction, paid once instead of twelve times. Measured against real payment processing, that is worth a few euros a year. It is not worth two months.
So two months free would have been a real discount wearing the costume of an efficiency. One month free is the honest version: a discount given deliberately, with the reason stated, because prepaying is genuinely useful to a small studio's cash flow.
This generalises into a question worth asking anyone: when you are offered an annual discount, ask what the discount is for. If it reflects a real saving, they can tell you what the saving is.
Five questions worth asking before you sign
What exactly is included in this price, and what is quoted separately? A number without a scope is not a price.
What happens after launch? Who keeps the site online, applies security updates and restores it if something goes wrong, and what does that cost per month?
If I want to leave, what do I own and what can I take with me? Ask for the answer in writing, and expect a nuanced one: your content and your design are yours in almost any honest arrangement, while the underlying implementation usually is not.
How many rounds of changes are included, and when does a round end? An unbounded revision promise is not generosity, it is a disagreement scheduled for later.
Who owns the design, and can it be sold to somebody else afterwards?
Lutheis answers all five in public: the prices are on the pricing page, the terms are published in full, and the FAQ says what a revision round covers and what you own. If your question is not answered there, ask it directly and you will get a real answer rather than a meeting invitation.