I run projectcostestimator.com, a free website-cost calculator. The question I get most from other builders isn't "how do you price a site" — it's "why did two quotes for the same brief come in 10x apart." So I pulled the raw rate table the calculator itself reads at estimate time and published it: 12 platforms × 6 regions = 72 rate combinations, 432 individual figures, and the spread between the cheapest and the most expensive hourly rate in the table is 50.8x — $8/hour to $406/hour.
What's actually in the table
Each of the 72 rows is a platform (WordPress, Shopify, Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, Magento 2, Magento 1, PrestaShop, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, custom/full-stack) crossed with a region (Eastern Europe, Western Europe, UK, US, Australia, South/SE Asia), and each row carries a freelancer and an agency figure, each as low/median/high in USD/hour. It's sourced from Clutch, Arc.dev, Upwork medians, Talmatic's global rate snapshot and TechReviewer, refreshed on an automated pipeline. It's the same JSON file our own pricing engine loads at estimate time — not a marketing number computed separately from what the product actually does.
Where the 50x actually comes from
The floor is Wix and Squarespace freelancers in South/SE Asia: $8/hour low, $16 median. The ceiling is Shopify Plus and Magento 2 agencies in the US: $406/hour high. Those aren't the same job at two prices — they're opposite ends of platform complexity (templated builder vs. enterprise commerce replatform) crossed with opposite ends of regional cost-of-living and delivery model (solo freelancer vs. agency with PM overhead). Collapse either axis — quote "web developer rate" with no platform or no region — and you're averaging numbers that were never comparable, which is exactly why generic "average website cost" figures are close to useless for pricing an actual brief.
How we calibrate it, not just where it comes from
The set behind these numbers is 600+ project quotes and public rate benchmarks — projects scoped and quoted since 2011, plus the published platform data above — recalibrated against fresh source pulls on a daily job. Two things we deliberately did not do: we didn't model a junior/mid/senior seniority ladder (the table is one blended "mid-level" tier, disclosed as that, not invented as three), and we didn't dress up 600 quotes as a tracked database of customer invoices, because it isn't one.
What it's not
No seniority bands, no claim of being invoice-level ground truth, and it's a mid-level blended rate — not a floor for junior work or a ceiling for senior specialists. If your use case needs that granularity, the table will undersell the gap further.
Data version: rate table reviewed 2026-07-16, underlying rates sourced 2026-04-09. Free, CC BY 4.0: full table · raw CSV. Cite it as: Project Cost Estimator, "Rate Database 2026", projectcostestimator.com/rate-database (CC BY 4.0).
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