This decision is usually framed as budget versus quality, which is the wrong axis. Plenty of expensive sites are templates underneath, and plenty of modest budgets produce something entirely bespoke. The real question is which set of constraints suits what you are trying to do.
What a template actually gives you
A template is a set of decisions someone already made: the layout patterns, the type scale, the way a product page is structured. If those decisions fit your business, you are getting them for a fraction of what it costs to make them yourself. That is a genuinely good trade.
It stops being a good trade the moment your business needs something the template did not anticipate. Then you are paying to fight the template — and that fight is usually more expensive than building the piece properly in the first place.
What custom gives you, and what it costs
A custom build means the structure follows your business rather than the other way around. Nothing is present because a demo needed it, and nothing is missing because a theme author did not think of it. Pages are lighter, because they only contain what you use.
The cost is time and decisions. Someone has to decide what goes on the page, and that someone is partly you. A custom project needs your input in a way a template does not.
Three questions that usually settle it
Does your business explain itself in a standard shape? If a visitor arriving at your site needs the same things they would need at a competitor’s, a template is likely to fit.
Will the site need to change often, and by whom? Templates are easier to launch and harder to evolve. Custom builds are the reverse.
Is the website the product, or a brochure for it? If people judge your work by how your site behaves — agencies, studios, product companies — the site is part of the product, and templates show.
The honest middle
Most good projects are neither. A custom design system with standard patterns underneath gets you a site that looks like nobody else’s and still takes weeks rather than months. That is where most of our work sits, and it is what we recommend unless there is a reason not to.