You have three quotes for the same website. One says £1,800. One says £4,500. One says £9,000. All three developers looked at the same brief, and none of them is obviously lying to you.
So what is going on? Almost always, the three quotes are not for the same thing. They only look like they are because they share a name. This post is about how to line them up so you can see what each number is actually buying.
Start by asking what is in the number
A quote is a price for a list of work. If the list is not written down, you cannot compare the prices, because you do not know what the prices are for. The first thing I would do with any quote, mine included, is turn it into a list.
Ask each developer to spell out the following, in writing, before you look at the figure again:
How many pages, and whether each one is designed individually or built from a shared layout.
Who writes the words, and who finds and edits the photos.
What happens on your phone. Every developer says the site is mobile friendly. Ask what they test it on.
Whether the site is set up so you can edit it yourself, and whether a short handover is included.
What is included after launch: bug fixes, a check on the first month, or nothing.
If a developer cannot or will not answer those, that tells you something before the price does.
The lines that quietly change a quote
Three areas account for most of the gap between quotes, and they are rarely visible in the headline number.
The first is content. If one quote assumes you will hand over finished copy and images, and another includes writing them, the second is going to look expensive. Neither is wrong. Writing good copy for a small business takes days, and somebody is paying for those days.
The second is search. A site can look identical and be built very differently underneath: page titles, headings, image sizes, how fast it loads, whether old URLs are redirected if you are replacing an existing site. If you already get enquiries from Google, ask each developer what they do to protect that. I wrote about the mechanics of that in moving off a website builder without losing SEO. A quote that says nothing about it is a quote that probably does nothing about it.
The third is who owns and hosts what. Some low headline prices come with a monthly plan that holds your site. Fine, but find out whether you can take the site with you if you leave, and what that costs. Running costs are a separate topic, and I broke them down in what a website costs to run each year.
Why the middle quote is not automatically the safe one
People tend to take the middle number on the theory that it avoids the extremes. That is a habit, not a method. The middle quote might be from the developer who understood your brief best, or from the one who read it least carefully and priced by feel.
The way to tell is to look at the questions each developer asked you before quoting. A good quote usually comes after a conversation. If a number arrived within an hour of your email with no questions at all, it was an estimate for a generic website, not a price for yours.
The size of the job sets the price, and the price should follow the job
I do not give a figure without knowing the job, and I explained the reasoning in how I quote a website. The short version is that pages, features, content and how custom the design needs to be decide almost everything. Tell a developer where you sit on those four and you will get a number you can actually hold them to.
It also helps to be honest about what the site needs to do. A site whose only job is to get a plumber's phone number in front of someone in Hessle at 7am has very different needs from one taking bookings. Paying for features you will not use is the most common way to overspend, and it is a problem of the brief, not the developer.
A simple way to compare three quotes
Put them in a table. One column per developer, one row per item from the list above. Fill in what each includes, and mark the gaps. Then ask each developer to price the gaps, so all three quotes cover the same scope.
The spread often shrinks a lot once you do that. The remaining difference is the real difference: experience, speed, what the person will be like to work with in month three when something breaks. That last one is worth more than most people credit, and it is the thing a price cannot show you.
Also check what happens if you want to change your mind halfway. A fixed price with no room to adjust can be a good thing or a trap depending on how change requests are handled, so ask how they are priced before you sign.
What I would do if I were you
Ask for the scope in writing, line it up, ask the follow-up questions, and pick the person whose answers were clear rather than the one with the lowest number or the smoothest pitch. Then read the terms about ownership and what happens if you part ways.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on quotes you already have, or you want to talk through what your own site needs so you can ask for the right thing, I offer a free 30 minute surgery. Bring the quotes, I will tell you honestly what I see. Book one through the contact page.
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