A €100 court ruling, and what it says about cheap websites

The case was decided by the Landgericht München I, the regional court in Munich, on 20 January 2022. A visitor sued a website because it loaded its fonts from Google's servers. Every time the page opened, the visitor's IP address travelled to Google in the United States, without anyone asking. The court held that an IP address is personal data, that the site had no good reason to hand it over, since the same fonts can be stored on the site's own server, and awarded €100 in damages for the loss of control over that data.

€100 is nothing. What followed was not. Within months, lawyers and serial claimants were sending waves of near-identical warning letters to small businesses all over Germany, most of whom had never heard of a font server. Their sites had been built fast and cheap, from templates, by people who had not heard of the problem either.

Whenever someone asks why one website costs five times more than another when the screenshots look identical, this is the story worth telling. The difference is rarely in the screenshot.

The rules a template does not know about

If your business is in Germany, your website needs an Impressum: who runs the site, a postal address, a way to contact you, reachable from every page. That is § 5 of the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz. The Berlin law firm von Engelhardt writes that a missing or hidden Impressum can be fined up to €50,000, and that thousands of warning letters have gone out over it. The courts do not even agree on every detail, which is a reason to get it right rather than nearly right.

Then a privacy policy that describes what your site actually does, not a generic one copied from a generator. A cookie banner, but only if you load things that need one, which fewer small sites do than you would think; we wrote that up separately, with a checklist. And accessibility: the European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025. Very small service businesses, under ten employees and under €2 million turnover, are exempt, but readable contrast, real text instead of text inside images and a site you can use with a keyboard are worth doing anyway. They help every visitor, including the one reading your opening hours on a cracked phone screen in bright sunlight.

What "built properly" looks like

A small project at a studio like ours starts with a conversation in which we mostly ask questions. What do you sell, who buys it, what should someone do after landing on the page? Then the text. Not filler with your name swapped in, but your words, cut down and put in order. Your photos, compressed so the page loads quickly on a phone with one bar of signal. Then the build: page titles and descriptions so Google knows what it is looking at, a link to your Google Business Profile, fonts stored with the site, and legal pages that match what the site actually does rather than a copy from somewhere else. If you need bookings or a calendar, that goes in. You see the site while it takes shape, two rounds of changes are part of the price, and at the end the site is yours to keep, with no lock-in.

What a small site does not include: a shop with three hundred products, an app with user accounts, ten pages in four languages, monthly content. Those are bigger projects. Anyone who promises all of it for the price of a small site is leaving something out, and you will find out which part later. The same goes for the other direction: if your business is a café that sells coffee for four euros, you may not need a site at all yet, and we say so in this post.

Whose name is on the domain

The worst situation in this business is a company that wants a new website and cannot have one, because the freelancer who built the old one five years ago registered the domain in his own name and stopped answering email. Whatever you pay and whoever you pay, make sure the domain is registered to you.

Then ask four more questions before you sign anything. Who writes the Impressum and the privacy policy? Where do the fonts, the maps and the videos load from? What does it cost per month after launch, all in? And who do I call when something breaks a year from now? If you get straight answers to all five, the price is probably fair, whatever it is. If you want to arrive at that conversation prepared, this is the list to bring.