The price range for a custom website is wide enough to be nearly useless without context. A business can spend $500 on a Squarespace template or $150,000 with a San Francisco agency. Both are technically websites. Neither number tells you what you are actually buying.
This post explains what a cinematic website from UM Media costs, what determines where a project lands in that range, and what you are actually paying for that you would not get from a template build.
The Numbers First
UM Media's Web Experiences start at $2,500. That covers a focused, single-brand build: custom design, cinematic visuals, interactive motion, SEO and AEO setup, mobile optimization, and launch.
When a Web Experience is part of a Cinematic Brand System, the site work is scoped as part of a larger engagement ranging from $7,500 to $45,000 depending on the build tier. The site does not cost more inside a brand system. It costs the same, but the creative direction, the imagery, and the AEO infrastructure are all built together instead of in isolation.
Standalone web builds at UM Media typically land between $2,500 and $7,500 depending on scope, complexity, and the number of content sequences involved.
What Drives the Price
The primary cost driver is not the number of pages. It is the number of custom cinematic sequences and the complexity of the motion design.
A site with one scroll-scrub hero sequence, three service sections, and a contact form is a different build than a site with five custom sequences, animated transitions between sections, an immersive portfolio experience, and a booking funnel. Both are custom. The scope is different.
The second driver is whether the imagery exists or needs to be produced. A site built around existing footage moves faster and costs less than one where the imagery needs to be captured first. When production and the web build run as a connected engagement, there is no gap between what was shot and what the site needs, because the shoot was planned against the site architecture.
The third driver is AEO and SEO infrastructure depth. A basic build includes standard meta, schema, and indexing. A deeper build includes full structured data, FAQ schema, HowTo schema, llms.txt, quick-answer content architecture, and the technical setup that makes the site legible to AI engines. More infrastructure takes more time to build correctly.
What You Are Not Paying For
You are not paying for a project manager who has never seen your brand to coordinate between a designer who has never met the developer who has never spoken to the strategist.
UM Media is owner-operated. The person who scopes the project builds the project. There are no handoffs, no agency markup on subcontracted labor, no junior team running the execution while a senior person handles the pitch.
That structure is why a UM Media site at $4,500 delivers what most agencies charge $15,000 to $25,000 to produce. The overhead is not there. The creative direction stays consistent from the first conversation to launch because the same person holds it throughout.
What a Template Cannot Do
Templates are built to serve every brand equally. That means they serve no brand specifically.
The scroll behavior, the typography scale, the motion timing, the spacing, the color system, the way the hero section sets the price tier in the first five seconds: all of that is generic by design in a template, because it has to work for a plumber and a luxury resort and a law firm and a food brand simultaneously.
A cinematic build is designed for one brand. The motion is timed to the brand's pace. The imagery is selected or produced to signal the brand's specific tier. The content architecture is built around the specific questions the brand's buyers are asking. None of that is possible when the foundation is shared with ten thousand other sites.
The Right Question to Ask
The question is not what does a cinematic website cost. The question is what is the current site costing you.
If the site is signaling a lower tier than the business operates at, the cost is in conversion rate, inquiry quality, and pricing pressure that should not exist. Those costs run every month regardless of whether a new site is built.
A cinematic site at $4,500 that closes that gap and holds it for two-plus years is not an expense. It is the arithmetic that makes the most sense once the current cost is visible.
If you want to know where your site specifically is costing the business, the Gap Diagnosis is the right starting point. It documents the gaps before any build decision is made.
To understand exactly what gets built, see the full Web Experiences process and what is included in every build. If you are weighing custom vs. template, here is the full breakdown of what that difference looks like in practice.