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Web agency in Marseille: what it costs and how to hire one from abroad

What a web agency in Marseille charges in 2026, what a French site has to include, and how to hire a Provence studio in English.

In March a British couple with four gîtes and a cooking school in the Luberon asked me up to Lourmarin to look at three quotes for their new website. They'd printed them out and we went through them at the kitchen table. What they wanted to know was which web agency in Marseille to sign with, or whether they should be signing with a Marseille agency at all, and their French, which is fine for the market and the mairie (the town hall), wasn't really up to a fourteen-page devis (a quote). I think that was half the problem.

I told them more or less what I tell anyone who writes to me in English. The small studios around Marseille that publish prices charge 900 to 3,000 € for a brochure site, a site vitrine as people say here, and the established agencies had come in at 4,800 to 16,400 € before VAT on the quotes I'd seen since January, usually with 90 to 240 € a month on top. A freelance web developer in Marseille charges around 480 to 550 € a day.

I'm in La Ciotat, 35 km east of the city, and my sites start at 1,900 € before VAT (about $2,200) and take two to four weeks, in English if that's easier for you.

The Marseille quote was 9,600 € before VAT with a "suivi" at 180 € a month underneath that nobody had explained to them. The studio in Bristol wanted £7,200 plus VAT. Good portfolio, but nothing about a .fr domain and nothing about the legal notice page you have to have in France. And the freelancer from the marketplace said $2,400 and ten days, then emailed a week later asking if France had "any cookie rules".

How the market works in Marseille

The husband had already been on Sortlist, which is where most French buyers end up, and he showed me the page on his laptop. "605 agencies," he said, "in the Marseille perimeter, whatever that is." On the first page one started at 200 € and another at 10,000 € and nothing on the page explained the gap. Before that they'd tried English-language lists, which were all Paris, and since the agencies here write their sites and quotes in French, a studio in Bristol was the first one that had felt easy to talk to.

I told him I split the 605 into four lots. The agencies with 11 to 50 people quote "from 2,000 €" or "from 3,000 €" and what you're paying for is a team and a project manager as well as the site. The one-to-ten-person studios start at 500 or 1,000 €, and there you can get very good work or a template someone repainted in an afternoon for the same money. Some sell a site by the month; Tool Advisor compared fifteen Marseille agencies and one of them starts at 89 € HT a month. Freelancers are the fourth lot and Sortlist doesn't count them at all.

They're far from the only ones in that position. INSEE counted 148,300 British people living in France in 2016, 1,695 of them in the Bouches-du-Rhône and 2,671 in the Var, before you even get to the Americans and the Dutch, and most agencies in Marseille still don't write a word to them in English, which for a web design agency in the south of France seems odd to me.

What a web agency in Marseille charges

Agencies don't usually put prices online. What I've got is the nine quotes people have sent me since January when they were stuck, the cheapest at 4,800 € HT for six pages for a garage in Aubagne and the most expensive at 16,400 € HT for a law firm in Aix, with a "positioning workshop" and two days of meetings on top. Seven of them had 90 to 240 € a month for "maintenance et hébergement", so their 180 € wasn't unusual, just on the high side.

"And what's HT?" she asked. It's the price before TVA, the French VAT, and TTC is the price with it, normally at 20%, so if you can't claim the VAT back (and they couldn't), their 9,600 € HT was really going to be an invoice for 11,520 €.

The "suivi" got the biggest reaction. At 180 € a month it doesn't sound like much until you work out that it's 10,800 € over five years, and you don't own anything more at the end of it than you did at the start. There's more on what pushes a quote up or down in the article on what a website costs.

Three things a French site must have

The Bristol quote covered none of this, which isn't really the studio's fault: it's just not something an agency in England ever has to think about.

The legal notice page, the mentions légales, gives your company's name, your RCS and VAT numbers, how to reach you and who hosts the site. Leaving it off can get you up to a year in prison and a 75,000 € fine, according to service-public.gouv.fr. I've never heard of anyone going to prison for it, but French visitors do look for that page, and if it isn't there they wonder whether you're real.

Then the cookie banner. The CNIL, the French data protection authority, says refusing cookies has to be as simple as accepting them and no cookie that needs consent can be set before the visitor says yes, and a lot of WordPress plugins do the opposite, with a big green button to accept and a tiny link for everything else.

And the domain name, in your company's name and not the agency's, and a .fr if your customers are mostly French. Afnic, which runs .fr, asked close to 2,500 small French businesses at the end of 2025, and 90% of the ones with a site owned their domain name, 56% on .fr and 37% on .com.

Since they have French and English guests, every page on their site exists in both languages, with the French written by a translator rather than a widget in the header. The rest of what I'd put on a small business site is in what a small business website needs.

Before you sign

At their table I did what I always do with a quote, which is to ignore the price for a bit. On the Marseille one I went looking for the domain first, and it was going to be registered by the agency, in the agency's name, so I told them about a restaurant owner in Toulon who spent four months emailing her old agency to get hers back and only got it because her accountant wrote to them as well. They hadn't thought about that at all. Why would you?

Then we tried to work out who was actually going to build it, and none of the three said. Often the person who comes to the meeting doesn't write the code (sometimes a subcontractor in Lille or Tunis does), which is fine by me as long as I'm told, if only so I know what language the support emails are going to come in.

The price of the second year wasn't on any of them either, and of the nine quotes people have sent me this year two had it, not the cheapest two. The Marseille one said "eight weeks" with no start date. Nobody had said who'd write the copy or take the photos, which on my last four sites is what decided the launch date, not the code, and none of them mentioned the mentions légales or the cookie banner, which nobody ever asks about.

The last thing I did was open two of the Marseille agency's sites on my phone, on 4G, out on their terrace. Google found back in 2017 that 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load, and I doubt people have gotten more patient since. There's more on this in how to choose a web development agency.

Working with a studio in La Ciotat from abroad

Their site went live three weeks after they signed, for 1,900 € HT plus a few days' work for the second language, 600 € for the translator and 380 € for a photographer from Apt, with the .fr and the .com both in their name. It took one video call and a written brief they approved before I designed anything, which is how I work with the four current clients who've never been to La Ciotat, one of them in London and one in Geneva.

When a big agency is better

"So should we just go with Marseille?" he asked at the end. For them, no, but I do send people to big agencies, the last one an olive oil mill near Salon that needed a new label, a film and a press launch in the same week this October. Once the budget is past 50,000 € I'd also rather you didn't depend on one person, me included. Under that you're mostly paying for the people between you and the code. If your site already exists and has just gotten old, a redesign is a different calculation.

If you have a French quote you can't make sense of, book fifteen minutes and we'll go through it together in English; only the booking page is in French.

FAQ

How much does a web agency in Marseille charge?

Small studios that publish prices charge 900 to 3,000 € for a brochure site. The established agencies on the nine quotes I've seen this year were between 4,800 and 16,400 € before VAT, and seven of them added 90 to 240 € a month. A local freelancer at 480 to 550 € a day (the Journal du Net's 2024 rates outside Paris) for five to ten days comes to about 2,400 to 5,500 €.

Can I find an English-speaking web agency in France?

Yes, there are some, and the first call is the quickest way to find out. In Marseille the quote and the contract will usually come in French even when the call was in English, so ask who'll write to you after you've signed. We do the whole project in English if that's what you want.

What does HT mean on a French quote?

Hors taxes, so the price before TVA, which is VAT. TTC (toutes taxes comprises) includes it, and at the normal 20% rate 1,900 € HT is 2,280 € TTC. A French company gets the VAT back and a private person usually doesn't, which is why a proper quote shows both.

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