It is the first question every doctor asks and almost never gets a straight answer to. Here is mine, with the honest caveat that the price depends on what exactly you are buying.
The real range in Colombia
For a medical practice, you will find three tiers today:
- Subscription builders (Wix, Squarespace and the like): a few dollars a month. You build it yourself. The real cost is not the money: it is your weekends, and the result usually looks like what it is.
- Freelancer or small studio: typically one to four million pesos for a custom site. The range is wide because it covers everything from a WordPress template with your logo on it to genuinely original design.
- Agency: four million pesos and up, climbing fast once brand identity, photography or ad campaigns are added.
On top of that comes what rarely shows up in the initial quote: domain, hosting, SSL certificate and maintenance. Always ask whether they are included and for how long.
What actually drives the price
It is not the number of pages. It is this:
Whether it is custom or a template. There is nothing wrong with a well-made template, but paying custom-design prices for a template is a problem. Ask directly which of the two it is.
Whether anyone will maintain it. A medical site goes stale: hours change, phone numbers change, services change, the office moves. If updating a phone number costs a billed hour, in two years you have paid for the site twice.
Whether it is built to be found. A beautiful site that does not show up when someone searches “rheumatologist in Medellín” is an expensive brochure. This is real work, and it is the first thing cut when the quote gets tight.
Whether you are writing the content. Many low quotes assume you deliver all the copy. If you never do — and that is usually what happens — the project stalls half-finished for months.
The red flags
After years doing this, these are the ones that cost the most:
- A large deposit before you see anything. It is standard practice, and it is exactly where all the risk lands on your side.
- Approving mockups instead of seeing the site. An image does not tell you how it feels to navigate on a phone, which is where 80% of your patients will see you.
- “SEO optimized” with no explanation. Ask which specific searches they are targeting.
- They do not register the domain in your name. The domain has to be registered to you, not to the agency. Otherwise, the day you want to switch vendors you have a serious problem.
- A lock-in contract for something that is already built.
Another way to buy it
There is an alternative to the deposit model, and it is the one I use: build the site first and show it finished. The doctor gets a link to their real page — their name, their specialty, their photo — and decides on something they can touch, not on a promise.
It is possible because the build is automated: with no designer or developer in the loop for each site, the cost of showing you a finished version is low enough to take that risk on. That is why delivery takes 24 to 48 hours and not months.
I am not describing it as a sales pitch but as a reference point: if another vendor asks for a large deposit and months of waiting, you now know there is another way to do it.
The question that matters more than the price
Before deciding how much to pay, ask yourself what you want to happen when someone finds your site. That they message you on WhatsApp? That they book? That they understand why you and not the other one?
A one-million-peso site that achieves that is worth more than a six-million one that only looks good. And that difference almost never appears in the quote.