What a Website Really Costs in JapanReading the Gap Between a ¥956,000 Mean and a ¥500,000 Median

Mean ¥956,000, Median ¥500,000 — That Gap Is What "Market Rate" Really Means

Search for what a website costs and you will get "from ¥50,000" and "from ¥3 million" in the same set of results. Neither is a lie. But if you request quotes without knowing where in that range you personally sit, you have no basis for comparing them.

There is one number that helps. Surveys as of 2026 put the cost of a corporate website at a mean of ¥956,000 and a median of ¥500,000.

The mean is nearly twice the median. That means a small number of expensive projects are dragging the average up. What most companies actually pay is somewhere around ¥500,000; the near-million-yen "average" is being pulled by projects in the millions.

💡 Answering "about ¥950,000" when asked the going rate is statistically correct and experientially wrong. Decide first whether you are on the median side or among the projects pushing the mean up.

This article is about making that decision.

⚠️ Figures are indicative, drawn from various 2026 surveys. They vary by region, sector, and timing.

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What You Are Actually Paying For

The fastest way to understand the range is to look at the breakdown. Production costs split into roughly four parts.

The classic reason a quote jumps is that it includes "we will produce the copy and photography." Conversely, if you can supply text and images in-house, the same page count can differ by hundreds of thousands of yen.

When comparing quotes, do not compare totals. Line up which of these four are included and which are not, and the reason for the difference becomes visible.

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Ranges by Scale

Pulling together the 2026 surveys, the approximate ranges are as follows.

Small corporate site (around 5 pages)

• ¥150,000–650,000
• Company profile, what you do, contact — the minimum set
• Template-based sits at the low end; original design at the high end

Mid-size corporate site (around 30 pages)

• ¥300,000–1,250,000
• Pages per division, case studies, recruitment
• The scale at which a CMS such as WordPress becomes standard

Corporate site built to attract customers

• ¥500,000–1,500,000
• Includes SEO structure, content planning, analytics setup
• Costs more because it is designed not only to exist but to bring people in

Large sites

• ¥1,500,000 and up
• Multilingual, membership features, integration with core systems push it higher

E-commerce

Varies enormously with product count and systems integration. Using a hosted platform such as Shopify or BASE cuts the initial cost sharply; requirements for custom inventory management or back-office integration send it up fast.

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What Changes Depending on Who You Hire

It is not only the price that changes. Where the risk sits changes too.

Freelancers

• Easier to keep the price down
• Decisions are fast, and detailed requests get through
• Risk: illness, overload, or closing the business stops everything. Without handover documentation, nobody can take over

The mitigation is to keep ownership of the work and the accounts with your company. Hold the domain, the server, and CMS administrator rights in your own name, and you can continue whoever is doing the work.

Small and mid-size agencies

• Have both design and build capacity, and continue when staff change
• Usually bundled with a maintenance contract
• Risk: maintenance becomes a fixed cost

Large agencies

• One stop from strategy through operations
• Come into their own on large, multi-department projects
• Risk: even small changes consume hours and calendar time

Do it yourself (no-code)

Wix, STUDIO, Squarespace and similar let you run a site for a few thousand yen a month. For a site that functions as a business card, that is entirely sufficient.

The risk is your own time. If you spend 100 hours instead of paying an agency ¥500,000, you have removed 100 hours from work billing at ¥5,000 an hour. Whether it was cheap depends on what those hours could have produced.

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The Running Costs People Forget

You are not finished when it launches. Some costs recur annually.

Without outsourced maintenance, the total runs around ¥1,000–3,000 a month; with it, around ¥5,000–30,000 a month.

The item most often missed is the CMS. If you run WordPress, the moment updates to core, theme, and plugins stop, the vulnerabilities stay. A contract that does not specify who performs updates will become a problem within a few years — reliably.

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What Changed by 2026

No-code tools and AI have lowered the floor on design. With a template plus AI-generated design, you can now produce yourself something that looks like what used to cost hundreds of thousands of yen.

What has not come down:

• deciding what to put on the site
• structuring it so people find it in search
• building the path toward an enquiry
• keeping it updated

In other words, the cost of building has fallen and the cost of making it work has not. Since cheap production has multiplied the number of sites that look alike, the differentiation has moved to content and operations.

When you read a quote, looking at how many hours are allocated to planning and operations tells you more about whether the price is reasonable than the design line does.

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A Checklist for Comparing Quotes

1. Who supplies the copy and photography? The single largest variable.
2. Is the page count counted the same way? Agency A's "10 pages" and Agency B's "10 pages" may not match.
3. Is a CMS included, and how much can you update yourself?
4. Are the domain, server, and CMS administrator rights in your company's name? If they are in someone else's, you cannot move.
5. What does "maintenance" cover? Does it include update work, or only monitoring?
6. How many rounds of post-launch changes are free?
7. Do the deliverables include design files and source?

Number four matters most. Long-term cost is driven less by the price difference than by not putting yourself in a position you cannot leave.

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Summary

• A corporate website has a mean of ¥956,000 and a median of ¥500,000. The gap comes from a few expensive projects; what most companies experience is around ¥500,000.
• By scale: small (5 pages) ¥150,000–650,000, mid-size (30 pages) ¥300,000–1,250,000, customer-acquisition focused ¥500,000–1,500,000, large ¥1,500,000 and up.
• The biggest driver of price is who supplies the copy and photography.
• Running costs are ¥1,000–3,000 a month without outsourced maintenance, ¥5,000–30,000 with it.
• No-code and AI cut the cost of building, not the cost of making it work.
• The most important thing when comparing quotes is not the price but whether the domain, server, and CMS rights are in your own name.

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References

• Various 2026 surveys of Japanese website production costs (corporate site mean ¥956,000 / median ¥500,000, ranges by scale, indicative running costs)