How to compare two website quotes

Three quotes arrive for what you described as the same website. One is a few hundred, one is a few thousand, one is more than you paid for your van. Nothing in the three documents explains the gap, and asking directly tends to produce an answer about quality that could mean anything.

The gap is almost never about quality. It is that the three of them have quoted for three different pieces of work, and none of the documents makes that visible, because each was written to describe what that supplier does rather than to be compared against the others.

What follows is how to compare website quotes that were never written to be compared. It is a reading exercise, not a technical one, and it takes about twenty minutes per quote.

Why the same brief produces wildly different numbers

A website quote is a bundle of four things: build, content, launch and afterwards. Suppliers differ enormously in how many of the four they include, and the cheapest quotes usually include one.

That is not dishonest by itself. A supplier who assumes you will write your own words and host it yourself is offering a real service at a real price. The problem is that the quote rarely says which assumptions it made, so you compare a number that covers a quarter of the job against a number that covers all of it, and conclude that one of them is overcharging.

There is a second reason, and it is the one nobody puts in writing. Some quotes are priced on how long the work takes, and some are priced on what the supplier thinks you will pay. You cannot tell which from the number. You can tell from how the number is broken down, which is why a quote that is a single figure with no lines under it should make you ask more questions, not fewer.

The five lines to compare

1. What is actually being built

“A five-page website” is not a specification. Five pages built from one template is a different job from five pages each designed individually, and both get described the same way.

Ask each supplier how many distinct page designs, or templates, the price covers, and what happens when you want a sixth page later. A supplier who says “a page like the existing ones is free, a new type of page is quoted separately” has given you a genuinely useful answer.

2. Who writes the words and finds the pictures

This is the single most common reason a website that was quoted in six weeks takes nine months, and it is almost never in the quote at all.

Most quotes silently assume you will supply finished copy for every page and images you have the right to use. If nobody has said so out loud, assume that is the assumption. Ask the direct question: if I supply nothing, what do you do, and what does it cost?

3. What happens between “it looks finished” and “it is live”

Testing on real phones, redirects from your old page addresses so existing search results do not break, forms actually delivering to an inbox someone reads, and analytics recording anything at all. This is unglamorous and it is where a cheap quote most often turns out to be missing two weeks of work.

The old addresses matter more than people expect. If your current site has been up for years, some of those pages have accumulated search rankings, and a launch that does not map them across throws that away silently.

4. What you own at the end

Ask, in writing, who will hold the domain, the hosting account and the administrator login when the project finishes. A quote that is cheap because everything sits inside infrastructure the supplier controls is not cheap; the cost has simply been moved to the day you want to leave.

The answer you want names your business on all three. It is a short question and a supplier who is comfortable with it will answer in a line.

5. How changes are priced, before and after launch

Two numbers to extract: how many rounds of revisions the build price includes, and what a small change costs once the site is live. A supplier who charges a minimum fee per change will shape your behavior for years — you will stop asking for small fixes, and the site will drift out of date.

This line matters more than it looks, because a website is not a thing you buy once. Plenty of it stops working without anyone touching it, and the quote that makes small corrections expensive is the quote that guarantees they do not get made.

The cheap quote that is fine, and the expensive one that is not

None of this means expensive is safer. Plenty of large quotes are large because of overheads you get no benefit from, and some of the best value in this trade comes from one experienced person with low costs.

A cheap quote is fine when its assumptions are stated and you can meet them. If you have your copy written, your photographs sorted, your hosting in your own name and no need for anything unusual, a low number can be entirely honest.

An expensive quote is a problem when you cannot see what the money is for. Not because it is padded, necessarily, but because a supplier who will not itemize before you have paid is unlikely to become more transparent afterwards.

If none of the three numbers looks plausible to you in either direction, the underlying question is a different one, and it is worth reading what actually drives the price of a website before deciding which of your bidders is the outlier.

The signal worth watching is not price. It is whether the supplier told you anything you did not want to hear. Anyone who agreed with every idea in your brief either has not read it properly or has decided that disagreeing might cost them the job, and neither is a good sign. We will occasionally tell someone their existing site is fine and the money would do more elsewhere; that conversation costs us the project and saves them a year.

What to do first

In order. Steps one and two do most of the work.

1. Send all bidders the same five questions. One email, written answers. The differences in the replies will explain the differences in the prices.
2. Rewrite each quote onto one sheet. Use the same five headings. Anything a supplier did not mention goes in as “not included” until they confirm otherwise.
3. Price the gaps into the cheaper quotes. Add the missing items at a realistic figure, then compare totals rather than headline prices.
4. Ask what they would remove. If your budget were smaller, what goes first? The answer tells you what they think matters.
5. Get launch and ownership in writing. Both should be answered before you pay a deposit.

One thing worth saying plainly, since it decides more projects than price does. Whoever you choose, you will be exchanging messages with them for months, and possibly for years afterwards. Clarity now is a reasonable proxy for how the rest of it will go. A supplier whose quote you can understand without a follow-up call is showing you something about how they work, and it is the most reliable signal in the entire document. If you would like a quote written in exactly this shape to compare against the others, tell us what you are trying to do and we will put one together.

Before you read another line of any of them, write the five questions into one email and send it to all three. Most of what you need to know is in which of them answers properly.