This is one of the more common questions we hear from new clients, and rightly so!
When trying to figure out how much your website will cost to either build or redesign, it can feel impossible to figure out how much you should be planning to spend.
This is not helped by the fact that most web design agencies do not like to publicly list pricing anywhere on their site. That means that when you’re just starting out in the process, you’re forced to call the agencies and receive “custom quotes” from a sales person, even if you’re just in the information gathering stage of your buying journey.
To be honest, we’ve thought like this in the past too, but have done our best to transparently list our pricing, as much as is possible, for standard websites. You can find that information here. We understand that you may not be ready to engage with a member of our team yet, and that’s totally fine!
2 Main reasons why integrations cost more
There are two main reasons that integrating a 3rd party tool into your website will cost extra in addition to your standard fees.
Plugin fees
You may have a feature that you want included in your new website, like payment processing. Often, these features are easy enough for your developer or web design agency to implement, but they most likely will be able to use a pre-built plugin to achieve your desired result.
Plugins enhance the functionality of your website, and some can be free, but more complex plugins usually require payment. These can also have annual fees in some cases.
Development hours
Integrating a custom feature, plugin, etc. requires special attention from our developers, which incurs additional costs. The variation in price depends on the complexity of the feature you want to implement, but this can range from $500 for simple payment processing to $5,000+ for robust multi-faceted features.
Custom features (we call these custom development) and functionality tends to be priced entirely around the hours we estimate it will take our developers and designers to implement what you want. While we wish we could give you prices for all scenarios, this truly is a case by case area, but we’ve listed the most common feature requests from our clients below. Varying prices for these features are the main reason that our costs to a client differ from project to project. It comes down to how complex the integration or development work is.
What are common website integrations and features?
- Payment Processing (Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, etc.)
- Point of Sale Integration (Square, Shopify, etc.)
- Booking Engine
- Automated Calendar Appointments / Bookings
- Invoicing Integration
- Business Process Automation and Workflow
Should I link to the third party tool or integrate into my website?
This is a question of budget, user experience, and your overall goals.
Tight on cash? If so, it may be hard to budget another $1,600 to integrate a booking engine into your business’ website.
If cash is not the primary consideration, user experience and your overall goals should be front and center when deciding whether or not to integrate new features into your company website.
Will it greatly improve your customer’s experience when buying from you? If so, it’s going to be worth the one time cost to integrate that payment processing feature into your website.
What if you’ve done the hard work of creating lots of helpful content on your website, but customers aren’t consuming it due to links taking them off your website? You may not want to add to this by linking to an external 3rd party tool, when you can build it into your website and keep your customers engaged on your site.
Still unsure of whether to integrate that new feature? Schedule a call with a local team member.
