What a frontend agency costs in 2026
Frontend agency pricing comes down to a day rate multiplied by team size and duration, and all three vary widely. Few agencies publish a price list, so the figures on this page are indicative ranges a buyer is likely to meet, not quotes. The more useful part is what sits behind them: the engagement model, the scope and the people.
How frontend agencies charge
| Model | What you pay for | Fits | Risk to manage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed price | An agreed result, such as a storefront or a component library | Work with a stable specification and finished designs | Anything outside the specification becomes a change order |
| Time and materials | Engineer days at an agreed rate | Migrations and refactors where unknowns surface during the work | Spend drifts unless there is a sprint budget |
| Dedicated squad | A standing team billed monthly | Long product roadmaps and platform rebuilds | You carry the cost in quiet months |
| Staff augmentation | Individual engineers who join your team | Teams with strong technical leadership and a hiring gap | Quality depends on your own code review and onboarding |
| Audit | A short fixed-fee review of performance, accessibility or architecture | A second opinion before a rebuild | A report changes nothing unless someone implements it |
Indicative rate bands by type of provider
Agencies that state an hourly band on public profiles tend to give a wide one, because it covers every role from junior to principal. When we looked in late 2026, self-reported bands for European frontend shops ran from about $25 to about $149 per hour, and stated minimum projects from about $5,000 to about $50,000. Treat these as indicative figures for a first conversation. The table shows where each type of provider usually sits inside that spread.
| Type of provider | Where its rate tends to sit | Typical minimum | What the rate buys |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelance frontend engineer | Lower to middle of the spread | None, often a few days | One person, no reviewer and no project management |
| Generalist software house | Lower half of the spread | Small to medium project | A mixed team in which frontend is one skill among several |
| Framework or headless commerce specialist | Upper half of the spread | Medium to large project | Engineers who work on one stack every day |
| Design-to-code studio | Middle to upper part, usually quoted per project | A scoped first version | Designers and frontend engineers in one senior team |
| Large engineering consultancy | Not published, quoted per programme | Large programme | Capacity, governance and many roles at once |
Indicative budgets for a headless Shopify build
Whole-project prices are almost never public. The ranges below are the order of magnitude that specialist teams discuss for custom storefronts on Shopify Hydrogen. They are indicative only, and a real quote depends on the drivers listed further down.
For an ongoing team after launch, expect monthly fees in the range of roughly €8,000 to €25,000, again as an indication. For projects above about €100,000, a paid discovery of four to eight weeks before the build is common and usually worth the money.
| Scope | Budget | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| Focused Hydrogen build on an existing Shopify Plus store | €60,000 to €180,000 | 2 to 4 months |
| Full Hydrogen migration with custom integrations | €150,000 to €400,000 | 4 to 7 months |
| Enterprise composable build | €300,000 to €700,000 and up | 6 to 10 months |
What drives a frontend quote
- Templates and components. The number of unique page types and interactive components sets the base effort.
- Design readiness. Finished, consistent designs cut engineering time. Vague or changing designs multiply it.
- Integrations. Every external system the interface talks to (CMS, search, payments, ERP, analytics) adds work and testing.
- Performance targets. Agreeing to pass Core Web Vitals on mobile for real users is harder than shipping a page that works.
- Accessibility level. Building and testing to WCAG 2.1 AA takes more time than leaving it to chance.
- Legacy migration. Moving URLs, content and redirects from an old stack is often a project inside the project.
- Seniority and location. Hourly bands differ by a factor of four or more between providers, and specialisation moves the rate as much as the country does.
Costs after launch
A frontend is never finished at go-live. Framework upgrades, dependency updates and browser changes need a few days each quarter even if no feature is added.
Headless builds also add running costs that a hosted theme does not have. As a rough indication, a headless CMS runs from about €500 to €5,000 per month, search from about €500 to €3,000 and monitoring from about €200 to €1,500. Hosting on Vercel typically starts at around €100 per month, while Shopify's own Oxygen hosting carries no extra fee.
Common questions
Why is a headless storefront so much more expensive than a theme?
A theme reuses the platform's rendering, hosting and checkout. A headless storefront replaces the rendering layer with custom code, so the agency builds and maintains routing, caching, preview and integrations that a theme gets for free. That buys design freedom and speed control at a higher build and running cost.
Are Central European frontend agencies cheaper?
Sometimes. Self-reported hourly bands in Central Europe often sit below those in Western European capitals, but specialist teams in the same region charge as much as their western peers. Specialisation and seniority move the rate as much as the country does.
What does a frontend audit cost?
Agencies rarely publish audit fees. An audit is usually a fixed-fee engagement of days or a few weeks, so ask for the deliverable in writing: the list of findings, their priority and an effort estimate for each fix.