Public sector procurement asks for a number early and then spends months discovering what the number was for. This is an attempt to give the number honestly, with the reasoning attached, so that a budget line can be written before a tender is.
The sizes below are the ones we publish on our pricing page. They are not specific to government, because the engineering is not specific to government, but which size a public sector project lands in is driven by a different set of forces than a commercial one, and that is what most of this article is about.
What does a government website cost? The sizes
| Size | WeebPal | Typical duration | What it buys in the public sector |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micro — Basic Informational Website | $1K+ | 2–3 weeks | A single-purpose public information page or microsite, run by one communications owner. |
| Small — Professional Corporate Website | $5K+ | 1–2 months | An information site, a library or resource hub, or a programme microsite: branding, content model and integrations on something already in production. |
| Medium — Advanced Digital Experience | $10K+ | 2–4 months | Multilingual publishing with an editorial approval chain, richer guided journeys, and an accessibility-audited front end. |
| Large — Complex Content / Transaction Platform | $30K+ | 4–8 months | A content or transaction platform: advanced search, publication workflow, business rules, and migration off a legacy CMS. |
| Extra Large — Secure Portal / Intranet | $50K+ | 6–10 months | An authenticated portal for citizens, staff or partners, behind the department's identity provider, with per-role access to documents and services. |
| Enterprise — Integrated Workflow Application | $80K+ | 8–12 months | A case-handling or application-processing system: multi-step forms, document handling, payments, approvals, audit trails and a back office. |
| Multi-Entity — Enterprise Multisite / Institutional Platform | $100K+ | 10–16 months | A shared platform across agencies, departments or regions, with central standards, a common design system and staged rollout. |
| Strategic — Mission-critical Digital Ecosystem | $200K+ | 12+ months | A regulated, high-availability ecosystem with formal security and accessibility assurance, multi-supplier delivery and joint governance. |
Before delivery, large programmes run a discovery and architecture engagement, priced against its own scope and credited against the delivery contract on award. Ongoing support and maintenance is separate from all of this, agreed monthly against the system you end up running. More on why below.
Why do public sector projects cost more than they look like they should?
An information site for a department and an information site for a company can look identical and price very differently. Five reasons, none of them padding.
Accessibility is a requirement, not a quality bar
Public services generally have to work for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation and assistive technology, and have to be demonstrably so rather than plausibly so. That means it is designed for from the start, tested throughout, and evidenced: three activities, not one checkbox. Retrofitting accessibility onto a finished build costs several times what designing for it costs.
Multilingual is structural
Official languages, regional languages and the languages applicants actually use are three different lists, and the decision about which list the system serves changes the content model, the editorial workflow and the URL structure. Adding a second language to a system that was not designed for one is close to a rebuild of the content layer.
The legacy system does not go away
A new portal almost always has to exchange data with a case management or records system that predates it and will outlive it. Those systems are often undocumented, occasionally unmaintained, and rarely have a modern interface. The integration is the project's largest single risk and the most common reason a fixed price gets renegotiated.
Applications are long, conditional and abandoned halfway
A visa, permit, licence or benefit application branches on answers given three steps earlier, requires documents the applicant has to go and find, and must survive being resumed a week later on a different device. That is a workflow engine with state, not a form.
The related cost is document handling. Every uploaded passport or certificate that a case officer has to read and re-type is processing time and an opportunity for error, which is why extraction is usually worth building rather than skipping.
Governance is work, and it is work you are paying for
Acceptance criteria written down, phase gates, a risk register, a steering cadence, an escalation path, and documents that procurement and audit functions can read. This is real effort and it is legitimate: it is what allows the people who sign for the programme to see what they are signing for. It should be visible in the plan rather than hidden in a rate.
Why is the first engagement paid?
Large programmes are scoped, not estimated. The discovery and architecture engagement produces the solution architecture, an integration map, a working prototype of the highest-risk workflows, a phased delivery plan with acceptance gates, a risk register with mitigations, and a costed estimate with stated confidence bands.
Two reasons it is paid. Work given away is work done cheaply, and a cheap architecture is the most expensive artefact on a public programme. And because it is paid, the output is yours to keep, including the source code of the prototype, whether or not you continue with the same supplier. It is credited against the delivery contract on award.
For a procuring body that is a useful property in itself: a discovery engagement produces a specification you can take to open tender, rather than a specification only its author can deliver against.
How does the payment schedule work?
Ordinary projects pay across four milestones (0% at proof of concept, 30% at kickoff, 40% at user acceptance testing and approval, 30% at go-live and handover), with working software in front of you before each one.
From the Enterprise size upward, work runs differently: paid discovery, then phase gates for foundation, core delivery, and scale and migration, each released against written acceptance criteria, followed by hypercare under a service level agreement. Change control, steering committee cadence and escalation paths are agreed before kickoff.
What should be in the price, and often is not?
Three items to check explicitly in any public sector quote, because they are the ones that turn into recurring costs later.
- Source code ownership. Many public bodies are required to show that a delivered system can be maintained independently of the supplier who built it. That requires the actual repository (application code, custom modules, theme, build tooling and deployment configuration) on open-source infrastructure you can host yourself, with documentation written for a developer who has never met the original team. We ship that on every engagement from day one: here is the full position.
- The warranty. One year as standard and up to three by agreement, included in the project price rather than billed separately, worked by the team that built the system. What it covers and what it excludes.
- Documentation and training. Technical documentation, user guides, administrator manuals and hands-on training. If these appear as a change request after go-live, the budget was never complete.
Genuinely separate, and correctly so: ongoing maintenance after the warranty period, which is support and maintenance and is priced monthly against the system you actually run.
What does this look like in practice?
Public sector and intergovernmental work is the largest part of our portfolio, and the published case studies describe what was built rather than what was promised: SPREP and the SPREP Virtual Library, PIPAP, PRISMSS, Fort Bend County, Texas and ERSRI. The sector page for this work is government and public sector.
How to place your own project on the ladder
- Is this publishing, or is it a transaction? A site that informs sits in the lower bands. A site where a citizen submits something, pays something or receives a decision is an application, and applications start at the Extra Large size.
- How many existing departmental systems must it talk to? Each one is a risk item, not a task.
- Is there a legacy system to migrate off, and does it have to keep running in parallel? Parallel running roughly doubles the integration surface for the duration.
- What accessibility standard must be evidenced, and to whom? Evidence is a deliverable with a cost.
- How many languages, and are they equal? A primary language with translations is cheaper than genuinely equal languages.
If the answers put the project at Enterprise size or above, the right next step is a scoping engagement rather than a tender written against assumptions. The pricing page sets out the bands and the governance structure, and you can describe the programme and get a read on where it lands before anything is committed.