In focus
The Gulshan postcode tax: why the same code gets quoted 12,000 and 2,80,000 BDT
Here is the mechanism nobody explains to you. A traditional agency operating around Gulshan and Banani carries real overhead — office rent on some of the most expensive commercial land in Bangladesh, a project manager, a sales person, a designer, a junior coder. When they quote your five-page site at 2,80,000 BDT, most of that number is not your website. It is their rent and their payroll, passed straight to you, with a comfortable margin on top because your Gulshan address signals you can pay.
At the other extreme, the 12,000 BDT freelancer has no overhead because there is barely any work happening — a nulled theme, a free plugin, shared hosting, and the development half of the job simply left undone. Both quotes are about everything except the actual engineering.
I run a third model on purpose. No office to fund, no layer of people forwarding your WhatsApp message to someone who forwards it to someone else, no markup for the neighbourhood — just one senior developer who designs it, writes the code, wires the bKash flow, deploys it, and answers the phone when you call. That removes the overhead that bloats the agency quote and adds back the development work the cheap freelancer skipped.
The scope is fixed so the price is honest: the 50,000 BDT tier is up to 7 pages with real on-page SEO and a 30-day fix window; 90,000 BDT adds more pages, a blog and a basic shop or booking flow; 1,50,000 BDT is a full bilingual small-business build.
Anything genuinely heavy — a custom dashboard, multi-vendor logic, an ERP or POS integration — starts at 3,00,000 BDT, and I will tell you which tier you actually need on the first call instead of letting your postcode decide for me.