Building an Accessible Website: Costs, Process and What Agencies Won't Tell You

A new website that is accessible from the start, built for a mid-sized company, usually costs between EUR 2,500 and 30,000, depending on scope and features (industry figures). The range is wide because the price depends mainly on how many pages, features and languages the website needs. This article shows you which items really come up, how a project unfolds, and which points many agencies would rather leave out of their quote.

If you want to have an accessible website built, you face a market with very different offers. Some providers sell a quick software add-on for a few hundred euros. Others quote five-figure sums. Both can make sense, and both can be expensive nonsense. You can only tell the difference once you understand what the price is made of. That is what this article is about: an honest cost logic instead of a wishful number.

What Does an Accessible Website Cost?

There is no flat figure, but there are reliable ranges. As a mid-sized company, having an accessible website built usually costs between EUR 2,500 and 30,000, depending on scope and features. There is no official price statistic. The following ranges come from published price figures of agencies specializing in accessible websites with a profile like Evelan, meaning custom development rather than ready-made templates.

What You Pay For During the Build

You are not paying for an abstract seal, but for concept work and development time. Every page, every feature and every interaction is concrete work. That is why the price varies so much: a lean image website is built faster than a multilingual portal with a booking flow. A serious estimate is only possible once the scope is settled. A clearly defined project with a fixed number of pages and defined features can be calculated far more precisely than an open undertaking without a concept, where both sides end up surprised. For more on the big picture, see our complete guide to web accessibility.

What Accessibility Adds to the Cost

Accessibility itself is not a large single item. On a modern, custom-developed stack, WCAG 2.1 AA, the international standard from the W3C, is built in from the start. The surcharge compared to a non-accessible implementation is, according to industry figures, zero to about 15 percent, and often it is already included. This is the real cost advantage of building anew: those who build correctly from the ground up pay almost nothing extra for accessibility. So anyone who wants to make their website accessible is usually better off financially with a new build on a modern stack than with any retrofit solution.

Fixed Price or Time and Materials?

Both models are common, and both are justified. A fixed price gives you planning certainty. But it requires a clear concept and a defined scope, because no one can seriously name a flat price without knowing what is to be built. Anyone who offers you a fixed price without a concept discussion is either building in a generous buffer or cutting corners where it matters.

Time-and-materials billing fits when the scope is still unclear or the website keeps growing. Here you pay for the hours actually worked. That is fair, but it requires trust and clean documentation of the work. In practice, a combination often proves best: a fixed price for concept and implementation, followed by an agreed hourly allowance for ongoing maintenance.

A third point, often overlooked, is internal time. Revising content, writing alternative texts, making decisions: this work happens on your side, in-house, and honestly belongs in every cost calculation. An agency can take a lot off your plate, but not everything.

What Determines the Cost?

For a new website, it is mainly scope and complexity that set the price, not the state of an old site. The more features and the more demanding the interaction, the higher the effort. That a new build often pays off is already clear from the market situation: 94.8 percent of all examined home pages show measurable WCAG errors, on average 51 errors per home page. Building further on such a base is rarely cheaper than a clean fresh start.

Four factors ultimately determine the price.

First, the scope. A five-page image website is built faster than a shop with filters, a cart and a checkout that has hundreds of states. More pages and more features inevitably mean more effort and therefore higher costs. Interactive elements such as sliders, accordions or pop-ups also count fully, because each one places its own demands on keyboard and screen reader operation.

Second, the complexity of the content and features. Static text pages are quick to make accessible. Dynamic areas, forms, configurators or booking flows need more care. This is where the most common barriers arise: according to WebAIM, insufficient contrast (79.1 percent of pages), missing alternative texts (55.5 percent) and missing form labels (48.2 percent) are the top problems. Building these correctly from the start avoids expensive correction loops.

Third, the technical foundation. Accessible web design stands and falls with the architecture. On a modern, component-based system, a button built accessibly once is reused correctly everywhere. At Evelan we rely on a stack of Next.js and a headless CMS, because clean, semantic structure there is the rule and not the exception. That noticeably lowers the effort for accessibility, because the foundation is right from the outset.

Fourth, maintenance. Accessibility is not a one-time project. Every new page and every feature can introduce new barriers. Those who plan for this from the start do not pay twice later.

A practical tip for getting your bearings: before the quote, have them show you which features you really need. Every feature you do not build, you also do not have to make accessible and do not have to maintain. A clear feature scope is the simplest cost lever there is.

How Does an Accessible Website Project Unfold?

A good project follows a clear process that makes costs predictable. Those who jump straight in without a clear concept risk expensive rework. In projects with B2B clients, I see again and again that the order of steps decides the budget: first the concept, then build accessibly from the start, then test with real assistive technology.

It all begins with the concept. Here, the goals, the content and the binding target standard WCAG 2.1 AA are defined. If an old website already exists, its content and insights feed in here, without taking on its technical legacy. So you are not building further on a shaky foundation, but starting clean.

In the implementation, the new site is built accessible directly. Semantic HTML, full keyboard operation, sufficient contrast and correct labels are part of normal development, not a special item at the end. Before go-live, testing is done with real assistive technology. Automated tools such as Lighthouse or axe only find a portion of the problems depending on the source, roughly a third to a good half. The rest is uncovered only by a manual test with keyboard operation and a screen reader.

The conclusion consists of the accessibility statement and the handover, including a maintenance process. Between concept and go-live, depending on scope, lie a few weeks. The biggest cost advantage arises when accessibility is part of the build from the start and not tacked on as a later repair. For how a complete overhaul unfolds, read our article on the website relaunch as an investment.

What Agencies Often Won't Tell You

Four things do not appear in many quotes, but cost you money or trust later. Anyone choosing an agency for accessible websites should know them and ask the right questions in the first meeting.

Follow-Up Costs for Maintenance and Re-Audits

Many quotes end at go-live. But a website changes. New content, new campaign pages, a new booking form: every change can introduce new barriers. Serious providers factor in a recurring re-audit and a maintenance process. Anyone who only offers the initial build is selling you a state that does not last long. So in the first meeting, ask specifically: what happens after launch, and what does it cost? An honest answer to that says more about a provider than any glossy pitch. For how to find suitable support, see our guide to choosing an agency for website maintenance.

Overlay Tools Do Not Solve the Problem

On the market there are widgets that promise, via JavaScript, to make a website accessible "with a single line of code." These overlays do not reliably fix real barriers in the code. They can even clash with screen readers. An overlay replaces neither an audit nor clean code, and it does not protect you from the obligations of the Accessibility Strengthening Act. Anyone selling you a tool as a complete solution is oversimplifying.

The "60 Percent Saved" Figure Is Marketing

You often read that accessibility from the start saves 60 percent compared to retrofitting. This specific figure cannot be cleanly substantiated. What is reliable is the qualitative statement from Aktion Mensch: building a feature accessibly is "fundamentally no more demanding" than building it with barriers. That aligns with the W3C, according to which it is most efficient to consider accessibility from the start of a project. The most honest conclusion: anyone facing an outdated website is usually better off with a new site built accessible from the ground up than with patching individual barriers on the old system.

An Audit Is No Guarantee of Compliance

A passed audit describes a moment in time, not a permanent state. As soon as your editorial team adds new content, it can unknowingly create new barriers, for example an image without an alternative text or a table without structure. That is why training your team is often the cheapest investment of all. Those who know what matters avoid most new errors while writing. You will find this item in hardly any quote, yet it decides the follow-up costs.

Is Accessibility Worth It Economically?

Yes, and from two directions.

The Legal Risk

First, for many companies it has been mandatory since 28 June 2025: violations of the Accessibility Strengthening Act can, under Section 37 BFSG, carry fines of up to EUR 100,000 depending on the breach. Whether the obligation applies to you can be clarified with our BFSG quick check.

Reach and Competitive Advantage

Second, you expand your reach. In Germany there live 7.9 million people with a recognized severe disability, which is 9.3 percent of the population. On top of that come people with temporary or age-related limitations. Anyone who excludes this group is giving away revenue.

The market shows how large the lead can be. In a test by Aktion Mensch, Google and the Pfennigparade foundation, four out of five German online shops failed basic accessibility tests. Anyone in that majority is giving away not only reach, but also an easy competitive advantage.

An accessible site is not only legally sound, it is also easier to use, loads more cleanly and is more readily picked up by search engines. Because the same principles that help screen readers also help Google: clear structure, meaningful headings, descriptive text. The Business Case for Digital Accessibility from the W3C shows this with concrete examples: at the US broadcaster NPR, search traffic rose by almost seven percent after the introduction of accessible transcripts. These effects pay off regardless of the obligation, and they extend the lifespan of your investment.

So calculate not only the price, but also the cost of doing nothing. A fine risk, lost customers, a later unavoidable emergency relaunch under time pressure: these items appear in no quote, yet they are real. A newly built website, accessible from the start, is almost always the calmer and ultimately cheaper choice compared to the frantic repair when a complaint or a cease-and-desist letter lands in your inbox. For orientation on prices beyond accessibility, see our overview of web design costs 2026.

Verwandte Evelan-Artikel

• Accessible Website: The Complete Guide for Companies
• BFSG Quick Check: Does the Accessibility Obligation Apply to My Website?
• The Website Relaunch as an Investment in the Future
• Web Design Costs 2026: Prices, Comparisons, ROI

Quellen

• Aktion Mensch: What Does an Accessible Website Cost? (2025)
• barrierefreie-agenturen.de: BFSG Costs, Prices for Accessible Websites (2026)
• WebAIM: The WebAIM Million, Annual Accessibility Analysis of the Top 1,000,000 Home Pages (2025)
• W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (2023)
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: Introduction to Web Accessibility (2024)
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: The Business Case for Digital Accessibility (2018)
• IHK for Munich and Upper Bavaria: The Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG) (2025)
• gesetze-im-internet.de: BFSG Section 37, Fine Provisions (2025)
• Federal Statistical Office (Destatis): 7.9 Million People With Severe Disabilities Live in Germany (2024)
• Bundesfachstelle Barrierefreiheit / Aktion Mensch: Test Report on Accessible Online Shops, Four Out of Five Not Accessible (2024)
• Bundesfachstelle Barrierefreiheit: The Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG), Overview and Entry Into Force (2025)