Ask three agencies for a quote on the same website and you'll get three wildly different numbers back. It's not really that anyone's overcharging — it's that "a website" isn't actually one thing.
A basic five-page site and a fully custom fifteen-page build with bookings, a shop and ongoing content are different jobs, even when the person asking sees them as roughly the same. There's also a simpler reason for the gap: a one-person freelancer working from a spare room has nothing like the overheads of an agency with an office and an account manager, and that difference lands straight on the invoice.
What actually moves the price
A few things drive most of the variation:
- Custom design work, versus adapting an existing template
- How many pages there are, and how much original content needs writing from scratch
- Extra functionality — online payments, bookings, memberships, hooking into other software
- Whether ongoing hosting, maintenance and support are included, or quietly billed as extras later
Upfront or monthly — it's a bigger decision than it sounds
Most traditional agencies want a large chunk of money before any work starts, sometimes the whole fee. That's fine if you're an established business with cash sitting spare. It's a real barrier if you're newer, or just watching cash flow carefully. Paying monthly instead spreads the same cost over the year, and usually rolls hosting and basic support into it rather than adding them as line items down the line.
What's actually worth asking
Whatever quote lands in your inbox, these four questions tell you more than the headline number ever will:
- Is hosting included, and for how long?
- If I want to leave, do I keep the site, the domain, both, or neither?
- What counts as a small change, and what gets billed as extra?
- How long does it typically take from signing to actually going live?
Nine times out of ten, the cheap-looking quote's real cost shows up in the answer to one of these, not in the price on the front page.