What a website actually costs, and what you are paying for
Quotes for the same website come back at wildly different numbers. Here is what is actually underneath them.
Ask three people what a website costs and you will get three answers that do not sit anywhere near each other. One quotes a few hundred, one quotes several thousand, and one will not give a number at all until you have had two meetings about it.
None of them is necessarily wrong. They are describing different things, and the word website is doing a lot of work in the middle. This is what sits behind the number.
Why nobody publishes a price
Partly because it would be wrong for most people who read it. A five page site for a roofer and a site that takes bookings and payments are not the same job, and a single figure on a pricing page would be misleading in one direction or the other.
Partly, though, because vagueness suits the seller. If you do not know the shape of the thing, you cannot tell whether you are being quoted fairly, and that works out better for whoever is quoting. That is the bit worth fixing, and you can fix it by knowing what actually drives the number.
What actually moves the price
Not the number of pages, mostly. People fixate on that because it is the only thing easy to count. Here is what genuinely changes the work:
- Whether the site does anything, or just says something. A brochure site and a site that takes bookings, payments or applications are different jobs
- Whether the content exists. Copy and photos are usually the longest part, and if they do not exist somebody has to make them
- How many one-off pieces there are. Ten pages that share a layout is less work than three that do not
- Whether anything has to connect to something else, such as a booking system, a CRM or an inventory feed
- How many rounds of changes are in scope before it goes live
If a quote is much lower than the others, it is usually because one of those is missing rather than because somebody found an efficiency. The common one is content: the price assumes you are supplying finished copy and photos, and most people are not.
The two structures you will be offered
Almost every quote is one of two shapes, and they are easy to mix up because both involve a monthly figure.
The first is a one-time build fee, and then a monthly for hosting, maintenance and updates once it is live. The build is paid for up front. The monthly keeps the site online, patched and changed when your hours or services do.
The second is a buyout: a higher one-time price, you own the files outright, and nothing monthly after that. You take on hosting and upkeep yourself or with whoever you like.
The number to ask about is the one up front. There is always a build cost, whichever structure you pick.
Where this goes wrong is when a monthly is presented as though it covers the build. It does not, and a site sold that way is usually a rental: stop paying and it goes away, because it was never yours. That can be a perfectly reasonable deal if you understand it. It is a bad surprise in year three if you do not.
Questions that tell you more than the price does
- Who owns the files and the domain if we stop working together
- Is the build fee separate from the monthly, and what exactly does the monthly cover
- Who writes the copy and who takes the photos
- How many rounds of changes are included before launch
- What happens when I need the hours or a service changed next year
You learn more from how somebody answers those than from the figure at the bottom. A quote that gets vague on ownership is telling you something.
What is worth paying for, and what is not
Worth it: pages that load fast on a phone on a bad signal, a phone number that dials when a thumb taps it, a form that reaches a human, copy that says plainly what you do and where you do it. That list is unglamorous and it is where nearly all the results come from.
Usually not worth it, at least not first: animation, a custom illustration set, a blog nobody has agreed to write, a redesign of a site that is converting fine but looks a bit dated. Visitors forgive dated far more readily than owners expect. What they do not forgive is a page that stops them doing the thing they came to do.
Work out what a customer is worth first
A build is easier to judge once you know what one new customer is worth to you over a year. For a roofer that number is large and the whole question changes. For somebody selling a twenty dollar item it is small, and the honest answer might be that a cheap template is the right call for now.
Nobody can tell you whether a price is fair without knowing that figure. Work it out before the first conversation and you will be the best prepared person on the call.
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