How Much Does a Next.js Website Cost?

A Next.js website starts from about £4,500 at the entry level, the same as any headless build, because a basic brochure site rarely needs Next.js at all. Real projects tend to cost a good deal more than that, climbing well into five figures, once you add the accounts, dashboards or interactive tools that justify picking Next.js in the first place.

Quick links

• What does a Next.js website cost?
• What drives the price up?
• Why does Next.js cost more than Astro for the same brief?
• What does it cost to run each month?
• How does it compare to a templated site over three years?
• Is Next.js the right call for your build?
• FAQ

What does a Next.js website cost?

Headless builds, whether on Next.js or Astro, generally start from around £4,500 at Aeonix, covering a small marketing site with a handful of pages and one or two integrations, as we cover in our wider headless website cost guide. Next.js can absolutely be built at that price. It is rarely the right tool for it.

The number that matters more is what happens once a Next.js site does the job Next.js exists for. Here is roughly where different specs land, using our own project pricing as the anchor:

Those positions are ours, not a market average, and other agencies will land in different places for the same brief. The shape holds regardless: a 15-page site and a 15-page site with user accounts are not the same job, even though the page count is identical.

What drives the price up?

Four things move a Next.js quote far more than the framework name on the invoice: how custom the interface is, how many systems it talks to, what CMS sits behind it, and how much content needs writing rather than moving.

Custom UI and interactivity

This is the one that explains why Next.js got chosen. Static pages with the odd interactive widget are cheap to build. A configurator, a live dashboard or anything with meaningful per-user state is not, because it needs real logic, real testing and usually a database behind it. In our own experience, taking a 25-page marketing site and adding user accounts with a login can more than double the build cost, even though the page count does not change. What the site had to do, did.

Integrations

Every third-party system a site talks to adds development time, because it means working around someone else’s API and someone else’s edge cases. At Aeonix, a CMS connection runs from £600, a CRM sync from £900, and gated content with real accounts from £1,500. A shop with checkout costs more again. Stack two or three of those onto a build and the total moves well past the entry price before the design has changed at all.

CMS choice

The content system behind a Next.js front end is a separate decision with its own cost implications: licensing, how much your team can safely edit, how much custom content modelling the brief needs. We rank the serious options in our guide to the best headless CMS platforms, and the choice affects both the build cost and the ongoing editing experience.

Content and copy

Migrating existing copy across cleanly is inexpensive. Writing it from scratch is not. We charge from £900 to move content across and from £90 a page to write it new, which adds up fast on a site with 30 pages of new copy. It has nothing to do with the framework, and it is the line item that most often gets left out of a headline quote.

Why does Next.js cost more than Astro for the same brief?

Because Next.js is built to run application logic on a server, and that capability costs something whether or not a given page uses it. Astro ships static HTML by default and only sends JavaScript where you explicitly ask for it. Next.js starts from the opposite direction: the React runtime and server infrastructure are there because the framework assumes you might need them.

We covered this trade-off properly in Astro versus Next.js: static output sits on a content delivery network and costs very little to build or run, while server features need somewhere to execute, which is a real, ongoing bill rather than a one-off. That does not make Next.js the wrong choice. It makes it the more expensive one for a job that was static all along, and the right one the moment the job is not.

A brochure site with a blog is, in nearly every case, cheaper and just as effective on Astro. A product with logins, a client portal, or a configurator with real state is where Next.js earns the premium rather than just charging it.

What does it cost to run each month?

Less than the build fee suggests, provided the site is not doing more work per request than it needs to. A Next.js site that renders mostly static or incrementally regenerated pages costs roughly what any headless site costs to host: modest, and largely invisible next to the marketing budget around it.

The number changes once a site leans heavily on server-side rendering or frequent server functions, because each request then does real work rather than serving a cached file. That infrastructure has its own bill, and it scales with traffic rather than staying flat. Vercel, the company behind Next.js, publishes its own current rates on its pricing page, and it is worth checking directly rather than trusting a number printed here, because hosting tiers change more often than build costs do.

The practical takeaway is a design decision as much as a cost one: the rendering strategy you pick for Next.js SEO is largely the same one that keeps your hosting bill sensible. Static generation for anything that does not need to be personalised, and server rendering reserved for the parts that do.

How does it compare to a templated site over three years?

Build cost is the number everyone argues about, but it is only ever half the bill. Hosting, maintenance and the eventual rebuild all sit on the other side of the ledger, and a templated site and a Next.js build differ on all three.

A WordPress site typically costs £50 to £300 a month to keep running once hosting, domain renewal, security, maintenance and content updates are counted, according to industry estimates for UK small business website costs. A well-built, largely static Next.js site sits closer to £15 to £60 a month, because there is less platform to patch and less server load to carry.

Over three years, that gap compounds into a meaningful sum before a single hour of development is billed on either side. It does not automatically outweigh a higher build cost, but it changes the comparison from “which is cheaper on day one” to “which is cheaper by year three”, and those two questions have different answers more often than people expect. UK development rates of £30 to £80 an hour for freelancers, and £75 to £200 an hour for agencies, also mean that fixing a templated site’s structural limits later is rarely a small job, which is the cost that a template’s lower sticker price tends to hide.

Is Next.js the right call for your build?

If the site has to do something, rather than just say something, generally yes. Accounts, a dashboard, live inventory, a configurator with real state: that is Next.js’s home ground, and the cost above is what capability costs.

If the honest answer is a marketing site with a blog and a contact form, the sensible move is a lighter stack, not a smaller Next.js project. The premium exists because of what the framework is built to do, and paying it for pages that never touch that capability is money spent on rope you did not need. The clearest way to find out which camp your project sits in is to work through the actual inputs rather than guess from the framework name.