Three Quotes, Three Prices, and No Way to Choose

You asked three studios for a price on the same website. One came back at $1,800. One at $14,000. One at $60,000 with a monthly retainer attached. The scope you sent them was identical. The proposals are not comparable in any obvious way, and the only honest thing you can say is that at least two of these people are wrong about what this work is worth.

Nearly every guide to this question answers it with a range — expect $2,000 to $75,000, it depends on your needs. That is true and completely useless, because the range is wider than the decision. What you need is not a number. You need a way to tell which proposal is describing real work.

Here are four checks. Each takes minutes, each works on any vendor including the one you already use, and each one is something we will demonstrate on ourselves first — because a check you cannot run on the person recommending it is not a check, it is an advertisement.

Check 1 — Was the price published before you asked?

A price invented for you can be invented differently for the next person. That is the entire problem with the quote model: you have no reference class, so you cannot tell whether the number reflects the work or reflects what the salesperson decided your business could absorb. Two identical projects routinely get quoted at a 3× spread by the same firm in the same quarter, and nothing about the work explains the gap.

So ask one question: do you have a published rate card, and is this quote on it? Not a “starting from” figure on a marketing page — the actual ladder, with the actual engagements, and what each one costs. If the answer is no, you are not comparing prices. You are comparing negotiating positions.

Run it on us: our rates are published in full — seven engagements, one price each, from $2,000 to $85,000+ a month, held for thirty days from the day you were sent them. Same numbers for everyone who loads the page. You can check what we would charge you before you ever speak to us, which is the point.

Check 2 — Does the proposal contain a number that can fail?

Read the deliverables section of each quote and mark every claim that could be proven false by a stranger with a browser. In most proposals the count is zero. Fast. Modern. Mobile-friendly. SEO-optimised. Built to convert. None of these can fail, which is precisely why they are there. A promise that cannot be broken is not a promise; it is decoration.

Ask for one measurable commitment with a consequence attached. It does not have to be ours — a load-time budget, an accessibility standard, an uptime figure, a defined revision window with a date on it. What matters is that it is checkable by someone other than them, and that something happens if it is missed.

Run it on us: every site we build scores 95+ on all four Lighthouse categories with zero accessibility violations, or it is free. And because a standard is only worth what its record shows, we publish the record — the public ledger carries the measured runs for our own properties under a fixed method, worst result of four consecutive runs published, no run discarded. It also records the changes we tried, measured, and reverted because they made things worse. A page of only good numbers is a marketing page. A page that includes the failures is a measurement.

Check 3 — Who owns it the day the relationship ends?

This is the check people skip, and it is the one that costs the most later. Ask, in writing, four things: where does the source code live, who holds the domain registration, who owns the analytics property, and what happens to all of it if you leave in month four.

The answers separate two very different businesses. One builds you an asset and hands you the keys. The other builds you a dependency and keeps them — the site lives on their proprietary platform, the domain is registered to their account “for convenience”, and the day you want to move you discover you are not moving a website, you are rebuilding one. That is not a pricing difference. It is a difference in what you are buying, and it never appears on the quote.

Run it on us: the repository sits in your organisation from the first commit. Not at handover, not on final payment — from the first commit. You can watch it being built in your own account, and if we parted ways tomorrow you would keep everything, working.

Check 4 — Will it pay back, and will they tell you if it won’t?

The most expensive website is not the $60,000 one. It is the one that was never going to return what it cost, sold to someone who had no way to work that out in advance. And the vendor almost always can work it out. They simply have no incentive to.

So put the question to them directly: what is the rule you use to tell someone not to buy from you? A firm that has one will say it immediately, because it is the thing they are proudest of. A firm that does not will produce a sentence about how every client is unique.

Run it on us. Ours is arithmetic and it is published on the rates pages: if twenty-five times your monthly software spend is less than what the build would realistically cost, the build takes more than three years to pay back — and we will tell you to cut the scope or keep renting. A three-location practice spending $1,350 a month on software should not commission a $90,000 booking platform; that is 117 months of payback and we will say so. A twelve-truck contractor spending $4,500 a month should commission that platform, because it clears in month 27. The rule disqualifies more prospects than it passes, and we publish it anyway, because we would rather lose a build than sell one that never pays back.

What the four checks are really testing

None of them is about price. They test whether a vendor has arranged their business so that being honest with you costs them nothing — published prices remove the incentive to price by appetite, a failable number removes the incentive to overstate, your ownership from day one removes the incentive to trap, and a disqualification rule removes the incentive to sell you something that cannot work. Any firm can be honest once. The question is whether they built the honesty into the structure, where it survives a bad quarter.

Which is also why the cheapest quote and the most expensive quote fail these checks at roughly the same rate. This has very little to do with budget.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because it is the part no checklist reaches: after all four checks pass, you are still choosing a group of people to think hard about your business for several weeks. The judgment, the taste, the willingness to tell you your homepage is saying the wrong thing — none of that is measurable, and it is most of what you are actually buying. The checks exist to clear the noise so you can spend your attention on that question instead of on decoding the pricing.

Two more things you can do this week

If you have quotes in hand, run the four checks on all of them before you compare a single number; you will usually find the shortlist has picked itself. If a proposal also includes automation, booking, chasing or reporting, the same discipline applies with different questions — our sister company wrote the matching set for that side of the work: how to audit an automation vendor before you sign.

And if you would rather start from evidence than from proposals, measure what you already have. Our X-Ray runs live diagnostics on any URL, free and without a sign-up, including your competitors’. Knowing what is actually wrong with your current site is the cheapest possible way to find out which of these three quotes was written by someone who looked.

On the other question everyone asks alongside this one — how long it should all take — we wrote that up separately: your website shouldn’t take three months.