What web development costs in Tbilisi
The public numbers are thin because most agencies quote on request. From the firms that do publish, a landing page sits around 300 to 1,500 GEL, a multi-page business site around 1,600 to 5,000 GEL, and e-commerce starts near 2,500 GEL and rises with catalogue size and payment integrations. Maintenance is commonly around $200 a month and hosting around $50 a year at the budget end.
Above that, pricing stops being a product and becomes a day rate. Custom platform work from the larger Tbilisi agencies is scoped, not listed, and lands in a different bracket entirely. That is not a rip-off, it is a different thing being sold. The mistake is comparing a $500 template package to a scoped build as though they answer the same question.
How to choose
Start by deciding whether you are buying a website or an application. A website is pages, a form and maybe a shop, and a CMS build handles it for less money and in less time. An application has accounts, logic and integrations, and putting that on a page builder creates a problem you pay for twice.
Then check the shape of the firm against the shape of the job. An agency with 200 staff and named bank clients is the wrong supplier for a five-page restaurant site, and a two-person studio is the wrong supplier for a payments platform.
Worth confirming on the first call
- Who holds the domain. It should be registered to you, not to the agency as part of a bundle.
- What the stack is. WordPress, Laravel, Next.js and a page builder are four different futures for your maintenance budget.
- Who edits the site afterwards. If every text change is a paid ticket, that is a recurring cost you should price now.
- What happens at handover. Ask for source code, database export and admin credentials in writing before you pay a deposit.
Red flags
- No written scope. "A website" is not a specification, and the argument arrives in week five.
- Portfolio pages with generic project names and no live links. Real work has a URL you can open.
- Registering your domain or hosting in the agency's own name.
- A quote that excludes content, photography and post-launch fixes without saying so.
- Any promise about Google rankings attached to a build quote. Those are separate products with separate evidence.
When you do not need to pay for this
If you need a one-page site with your services, an address and a contact form, and you are comfortable spending a weekend on it, a hosted builder will do the job for the price of a domain. Plenty of small Tbilisi businesses run that way for years without a developer.
Pay for a build when the site has to take money, hold customer data, integrate with a system you already run, or represent a company where a broken checkout costs more in a day than the build cost in total. Also pay when you have no intention of maintaining it yourself. A cheap site nobody updates is a slow liability, and the rebuild costs more than doing it once.
If the company behind the site is not registered yet, read our guide on registering a company in Georgia first, and check whether Virtual Zone status applies to what you are building.