The most common question we get on a discovery call isn't "how much" — it's "which platform should we even build this on." The honest answer is that the right platform depends on three things: how often you'll touch the content yourself, whether you're selling physical or digital products, and how custom your actual workflow needs to be.

If you mostly need a marketing site you can edit yourself — new blog posts, updated service pages, the occasional new landing page — WordPress with a well-structured page builder gets you there fastest, and it's what we reach for by default for services businesses, law firms, and clinics.

If you're selling products and need inventory, variants, and checkout to just work without you thinking about payment compliance, Shopify wins almost every time. We layer in Razorpay for Indian payment methods and build a custom theme so it doesn't look like every other Shopify store.

Next.js and custom builds come in when the site needs to do something a page builder can't — a booking engine with real-time availability, a dashboard your users log into, or an integration with a system you already run. It costs more and takes longer, and we say so upfront rather than defaulting to "custom" because it sounds more impressive.

We don't have a favorite platform. We have a favorite question, which is: what does this site actually need to do, three months after launch, once the excitement of a new site wears off?