What a website's price depends on

What matters most

Not the number of pages. A page with text and a picture is quick to make, and ten such pages are not ten jobs. The price is set by something else.

Whether the site has to calculate anything

A site that shows and a site that calculates differ in difficulty. A cost calculator, picking a product by its options, a check of available dates, a cart with payment — each of these means agreeing on the rules, programming them and testing them on the edge cases. This is where the main difference in estimates sits.

Whether you will edit the site yourself

A panel where you add products, prices and news yourself is a separate job, sometimes bigger than the site itself. If the content changes once a year, the panel is not needed: it adds cost and gives nothing.

Whether there is anything to connect to

A site that lives on its own and a site that exchanges data with your accounting software, your warehouse or your cash register are different things. The difficulty here is almost never in the connection itself, it is that the data on the two sides does not match.

Whether your content is ready

The most underrated item. Texts, photos, descriptions of services, a price list — if none of that exists, someone has to make it. That is normal and it is paid work, but it is usually not part of what people expect.

Why estimates differ so much

The three most common reasons, and none of them is about greed:

• They are pricing different things. One has included the domain, email, hosting and support; another only designing the pages.
• Different responsibility after launch. One hands over the files and disappears, another stays reachable when something falls off half a year later.
• A different way of working. A template out of a set and work built for your task are different amounts of time, even though in a screenshot they can look alike.

Where you really can save

• The scope at the start. Building what brings requests and adding the rest later is almost always cheaper than foreseeing everything up front.
• Your own photos. A phone shot in daylight often works better than a stock image the visitor has already seen on ten other sites.
• Texts from you. You know your own trade better. What you write in plain words we will put in order — that is cheaper than inventing it for you.

Where saving ends up costing more

• A domain registered to someone other than you. The most expensive small thing we see. Getting the address back can take longer than building a new site.
• Speed and the way it looks on a phone. Most people arrive from there; by saving here you save on all of your visitors at once.
• An agreement about support. The question is not whether something will break, but whether there will be anyone to turn to.

How to compare proposals

The simplest way is to ask everyone to answer the same four questions:

1. What exactly is included in the amount, and what is paid for separately?
2. In whose name are the domain and the hosting registered?
3. What happens if something stops working three months from now?
4. How much does it cost to change a text or add a page later?

After those answers the amounts usually become comparable, and it turns out that the cheapest proposal was not the cheapest.