Ask three people what a dealership website costs and you will get ₹15,000, ₹80,000 and "sir it depends". All three are true, which is not useful when you are trying to decide.
Here are the actual numbers by route, including the running costs that tend to arrive after you have signed.
The costs nobody quotes you
Every route carries these, and quotes usually leave them out.
| Item | Typical annual cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | ₹700 – ₹1,200 | .com or .in, from any Indian registrar |
| Hosting | ₹2,000 – ₹8,000 | Often bundled for year one, then billed |
| SSL certificate | ₹0 – ₹3,000 | Should be free. If you are being charged, ask why |
| Changes and fixes | ₹0 – ₹30,000 | The one that surprises people |
That last row is where the real money goes, and it is entirely determined by one thing: whether you can change a price yourself. If every edit is a message to somebody, you are paying either in cash or in a stale stock list. Usually both.
Route 1: freelance developer
Build: ₹15,000 – ₹60,000. Running: ₹5,000 – ₹35,000 a year.
You get something custom-looking, and you own the code. For a dealership that wants a particular look, this can genuinely be the right answer.
Two things to nail down before paying anything:
- Can I add a car and change a price myself, from my phone, without messaging you? If no, budget for the maintenance column above — every year, forever.
- What happens when you are unavailable? Freelancers change jobs. A site nobody can edit is a site that slowly becomes wrong.
The failure mode is not a bad website. It is a good website that is accurate for three months.
Route 2: agency
Build: ₹60,000 – ₹2,50,000. Running: ₹12,000 – ₹60,000 a year.
More reliable than a freelancer and considerably more expensive. Agencies are worth it when the website is one part of a bigger marketing engagement — ads, brand, photography. For a stock list, you are paying a lot of money for project management.
Ask specifically whether the CMS handles vehicles as vehicles, with fields for kilometres, ownership and fuel type and a sold state. If they are fitting your stock into a generic blog CMS, updating it will be miserable regardless of what you paid.
Route 3: website builder (Wix, Squarespace, WordPress yourself)
Build: your own time. Running: ₹6,000 – ₹20,000 a year.
Cheap and fully under your control, which are real advantages.
The catch is structural: these tools have no idea what a vehicle is. Each car becomes a hand-made page. There is no filter by budget, no filter by make, no sold ribbon. Selling a car means remembering to delete a page.
Fine at eight vehicles. Genuinely painful at forty. Plan on 15–25 hours to build it and a few hours a month to keep it honest — and price your own time, because it is the largest cost in this row.
Route 4: dealership software
Build: ₹0. Running: ₹6,000 – ₹36,000 a year.
The site is generated from your stock list, so there is no build phase and no drift. You add a vehicle in the app and the website has it.
You give up bespoke design — your site will look like a good catalog rather than a unique brand. For most dealerships that is the correct trade, because buyers are there to scan stock, not to admire a layout.
MotoDXR sits here at ₹799 a month per dealership, GST included, which is ₹9,588 a year with no build cost, no hosting bill and no charge per listing. You can point your own domain at it, so the ₹800 domain is the only extra.
Comparing over three years
Three years is the honest window, because year one flatters anything with a build cost.
| Route | Year 1 | 3-year total | Can you edit it yourself? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | ₹15k – ₹60k | ₹30k – ₹1,65k | Usually not |
| Agency | ₹60k – ₹2.5L | ₹96k – ₹4.3L | Sometimes |
| Website builder | ₹6k – ₹20k + your time | ₹18k – ₹60k + your time | Yes, slowly |
| Dealership software | ₹6k – ₹36k | ₹18k – ₹1.08L | Yes, in seconds |
The right-hand column is the one that decides whether the money was well spent. A ₹15,000 site you cannot update is worse value than a ₹30,000 one you can, because the cheap one stops being true.
What actually decides it
Three questions, in order:
How often does your stock change? A dealership turning over twenty vehicles a month needs self-service editing more than it needs a custom design. One turning over three can tolerate a slower process.
Who will keep it current? Name the person. If the honest answer is "nobody, really", pick the route where keeping it current is a side effect of work you already do, rather than a separate task.
Do you need a particular look, or do you need a stock list? Both are legitimate. Only one of them is worth ₹2 lakh.
A reasonable default
For most independent used vehicle dealerships in India, dealership software plus your own domain is the sensible starting point — you are live in a day, the running cost is predictable, and the site cannot go stale because updating it is the same action as updating your stock.
If you outgrow the look later, you have lost nothing: you will have a year of real data about which vehicles get enquiries, which is a much better brief to hand a designer than a blank page. MotoDXR's Pro tier exists for exactly that point — a bespoke site reading from the same inventory through the API, so you never end up maintaining two stock lists.
Before you commit to anything, read what a dealership website actually needs — it is a shorter list than most quotes assume, and knowing it makes every quote easier to judge.