Why two quotes for the same website can differ by five times

You send the same brief to four studios and get four numbers that look like they are for different projects. It is unsettling, and the natural reaction is to assume somebody is overcharging. Usually nobody is. They are quoting for different things, and the brief did not say which one you wanted.

Here is what actually sits behind the number, in roughly the order it matters, so you can read four incomparable quotes and work out what you are being offered.

“How many pages?” is the wrong question

Page count is the first thing everyone reaches for and it is a poor guide to effort. Twenty pages sharing one layout is a small job — build it once, fill it twenty times. Five pages that each need their own design, their own fields and their own behaviour on a phone is a bigger one.

What a studio is actually counting is templates: how many genuinely different page designs exist. A typical business site has somewhere between five and ten — home, service, service index, project, project index, article, article index, about, contact, and a general-purpose page for everything else.

The second thing is how much of your content is structured. A service that has a title, a summary, a list of deliverables, a price band and a photograph is not a page — it is a record with five fields, and it needs an editing screen built for it. Do that once and adding the ninth service takes four minutes. Skip it and every new service is a small design job for ever.

So a useful brief says “six services, four case studies, a blog, and the services need prices and deliverables” rather than “about fifteen pages”.

Designed for you, or decorated from a template

This is usually the largest single difference between two quotes, and it is rarely stated plainly in either.

One studio is buying a theme, putting your logo and colours into it, replacing the demo text and launching. The other is designing pages around your business — what you sell, in what order someone needs to understand it, what the evidence is, where the decision happens.

Both are legitimate purchases. They are not the same purchase. If a quote looks surprisingly low, ask which of the two it covers. If one looks high, ask what it includes that the cheaper one does not. Neither question is rude, and the answers are usually given straight.

One thing worth knowing about templates: they are designed to look superb with the demo content, which is always the right length, always has a photograph, and never has a service whose name runs to six words. Real content is messier. A lot of the awkwardness people blame on “the design” is really a template meeting a business it was not drawn for.

Who is writing the words

Content is the single most common reason a project runs late, and the single most common thing missing from a quote.

A site cannot be finished around text that does not exist. Somebody has to write it. If that somebody is the studio, it is a real line item — interviewing you, drafting, revising. If it is you, it is a real commitment of hours from people who already have jobs, and it is the step that most often stalls.

Be honest with yourself about this at the quoting stage. “We’ll write it” is said at kick-off far more often than it is done by week three. A studio that asks who is writing the content is not being difficult; it is the question that most reliably predicts whether a project lands on time.

Photography is the same conversation in miniature. Stock images are cheap and look it — anyone who has browsed a few supplier websites can spot the same handshake photograph on all of them. A half-day with a photographer is not expensive relative to the build, and it is usually the single biggest visible difference between a site that looks like a real company and one that looks like a template.

What the site has to connect to

A brochure site is a known quantity. The moment it has to talk to something else, the estimate widens, because the other system now gets a vote and nobody can see inside it until they start.

• Booking or scheduling. Usually fine if you accept the provider’s embedded widget; a real job if you want it to look like the rest of the site.
• A CRM. So enquiries land where your sales process already lives rather than in an inbox somebody has to remember to check.
• Payments. These bring their own rules, their own testing, and their own failure cases that all have to be handled properly.
• Stock, pricing or availability from elsewhere. The question is always what happens when the other system is down or slow.
• A newsletter platform. Easy, right up until you want it to know which page somebody signed up from.

If any of these matter, say so in the brief. An integration discovered in week four is far more expensive than one planned for in week zero, because by then the thing it needs to attach to has already been built a different way.

What happens after launch

Some quotes stop at launch day. Others include a support period, training so your team can actually use what you bought, and ongoing maintenance.

A website is software connected to the internet. It needs looking after, and if a quote does not mention it that is not a saving — it is a gap you will fill later, usually in a hurry. What that involves, and how often, is covered in what a site needs after launch.

Training is worth more than it sounds. The difference between a site your marketing person updates weekly and one that quietly goes stale is often a single hour of someone showing them how.

The questions that make quotes comparable

Rather than comparing totals, ask all four studios the same short list. It turns four numbers you cannot compare into a table you can.

Ask	Why it changes the number
How many unique designs, not pages?	Separates a big site from a complicated one
Template, or designed for us?	Usually the largest single difference between quotes
Who writes the words, and who shoots the photos?	The most common hidden cost, and the most common delay
Which parts can we edit ourselves?	Decides whether you pay for small changes for ever
What is included after launch?	Support, training, updates, hosting, backups
What happens if we need an extra page next year?	Tells you whether the thing was built to grow
Who owns the result?	Rarely asked, occasionally an unpleasant surprise

That last one deserves its own answer, and we wrote one: who actually owns your website.

The costs that are not in anyone’s quote

These are small individually and they are the ones that surprise people, because they arrive after the invoice has been paid and the project is mentally closed.

• Domain renewal. Small, annual, and catastrophic to forget.
• Hosting. Monthly or annual, and the cheap tier is cheap for a reason.
• Licences. Premium plugins, fonts and stock images are frequently per-site and annually renewable. A site that stops renewing them does not break immediately — it stops getting security updates, which is worse.
• Email sending. Free at small volumes, but it has to be set up or your enquiry notifications go to spam.
• Your own time. Reviews, approvals, gathering content. Real hours, from your most senior people.

Why the cheapest site is rarely the cheapest site

None of this is an argument for spending more. It is an argument for knowing what you are buying.

A site that cannot be edited without a developer bills you for every price change for years. A site nobody can find costs you the enquiries you never hear about, which is the most expensive kind of failure because it is invisible. A site that has to be replaced in eighteen months has had its real price spread across two projects.

Equally, a business that is still proving an idea does not need a bespoke design system. The costly mistake runs in both directions.

Start from the outcome

Work out what the site needs to achieve before asking what it costs. More enquiries from a better class of customer is a goal. Fewer phone calls asking things the site should have answered is a goal. “A new website” is a symptom.

Once you know the outcome, the question stops being how much does a website cost and becomes what is the smallest version of this that does the job — and that is a question anybody can quote accurately.

Writing it down is the step that makes everything after it cheaper. There is a guide to that too: how to brief a web designer. Or just tell us what you are trying to do and we will tell you what it involves, including when it is less than you expected.