Reading a quote for website work
Two companies quote for the same website and the prices land miles apart, because each of them has priced a different job. The number at the bottom is the last thing you should read.
Two quotes on the kitchen table
You asked three companies. Two came back.
One is four pages with your logo on the cover, ending in a single figure. The other runs to nineteen pages, has a table of contents, splits the work into phases with names on them, and ends with a figure nearly four times bigger. Both describe a website, and both list page templates and a CMS.
You have read them twice and you are no closer.
“They both say they'll build me a website. One of them wants eleven thousand and the other wants forty. I've read them both twice and I couldn't tell you what the extra twenty-nine buys.”
Price one piece of work two ways and the prices land near each other. These have not. What you are holding is two companies who read the same enquiry and understood two different jobs, and neither document says which job it understood, because each assumes theirs is the obvious one.
Tailtap builds this sort of work, so read the rest knowing that. It is written to be used on a quote from anybody, this lot included.
What a page count leaves out
Most quotes are built as a list of what you will receive. Homepage design. Six inner page templates. CMS setup and configuration. Two rounds of amends. A training session. Launch.
That list exists because it can be checked, which is a real virtue. It tells you what will arrive. What it cannot tell you is whether six templates is the right number, or whether the homepage will work out what a visitor came for before it hands them a catalogue.
There is a harder version of the same problem. If you wrote the brief, the fixed price is fixed against your own understanding of the job. You know your business better than these companies ever will, and you are still the worst-placed person in the room to specify a website, because specifying one means knowing what a stranger needs in order to choose you. A fixed price against a spec you wrote moves the risk of that spec being wrong onto your side of the table. When it emerges in month two that the six templates should have been four templates and a way to filter by room, that is a variation, and variations get priced after signature.
The word to look at hardest is discovery. Each quote will carry a discovery line, priced, appearing as one line on both documents.
Discovery, on one quote
A sixty-minute call to confirm the sitemap you already sent them.
Discovery, on the other
A week of work. Somebody talks to the two people who answer your phone, sits in the showroom for an afternoon, reads a year of enquiry emails, and comes back with a written view of what visitors are trying to work out before they will ring you.
Ask each company what discovery leaves behind that you can read, and ask to see one from another client with the name taken off. Discovery that produces no document is a meeting with an invoice attached.
If either quote carries a line for SEO or ads, judge it separately and with somebody else. That is a different trade and nothing here will help you compare it.
Where the enquiry lands
Every quote you hold has a line that says contact form or enquiry form. One line, six words. On one document it comes to a few hundred euro and on the other to several thousand, and the wording is close to identical.
Underneath that identical wording sit two different objects.
A few hundred euro
Sends an email. A message arrives in an inbox. Somebody reads it and retypes the details into wherever the work happens, which might be the diary or the spreadsheet your surveyor keeps on his laptop.
Several thousand
Writes a record into that system directly. It arrives in the software your staff already open every morning, carrying the answers the customer gave and a status you can sort by.
None of that shows up in a design mockup. It shows up on a Tuesday in February with forty enquiries in the queue and one person off sick.
The number of enquiries stays the same. What changes is what the person answering one starts with. Somebody opening an enquiry that already carries the room measurements and the timescale is beginning a different conversation from somebody opening a message that says hello, can you give me a price.
So when you set that line against the same line on the other quote, you are comparing an email to a piece of software. Ask both companies to name the system an enquiry ends up in, and who retypes anything by hand. If the answer is your inbox, that is an honest answer and it is cheap for a good reason. That answer also puts a person in the loop permanently, and that cost lands in a different budget.
The migration nobody priced
Content migration is where a quote goes wrong most quietly, because it is the line that looks administrative.
Say your site has four hundred pages, and a good chunk of them are PDF spec sheets and news posts nobody has opened since 2019. Moving four hundred pages into a new CMS is not copy and paste, because the new CMS has different fields in it. Your old product page held one block of text with everything jumbled together. The new one wants a short description, a dimensions table, a list of applications, and somewhere to hang the PDF. Somebody has to open four hundred pages and decide what belongs where, including a call on the two hundred that should be deleted instead.
Read both quotes for who that somebody is.
A quote might price the work by the page or by the day, which is expensive and honest and gives you a number you can argue with. It might say client to supply content in the agreed template, which means you are doing it, and the words agreed template mean you will be doing it a second time if the template changes in month three. Or the line reads content migration included with no volume attached, in which case ask how many pages included covers and what happens at page four hundred and one.
This matters more than the design fee, because migration is the part of the project that lands on your staff during an ordinary working month. Design decisions cost you meetings. Migration costs you evenings.
What you own on the Monday after
A website you cannot change without ringing somebody is a website you will be quoted for again in eighteen months.
Ask the next few in writing, because the answer on a call and the answer in a contract have a habit of differing.
Who holds the CMS licence. If the build sits on a licensed platform, find out whose name the licence is in and whether it is charged per person who logs in. Per-seat pricing is the one that catches people out. You pay for the build. Then next spring you want three more staff able to update stock, and the platform wants a few hundred a head for the privilege.
Where the code lives. Ask for the repository to sit in an account your company owns, with the agency invited into it, and not the other way round. Arranging that at the start takes ten minutes and costs nothing. Arranging it during a falling-out is close to impossible. Same goes for the domain and the hosting account.
Who can edit what. Some builds hand you a CMS where you can change any word on any page. Others let you edit product descriptions and turn everything else into a support ticket. Both are defensible. Only one is what most people picture when a quote says content management system.
You may never need any of this. On the one occasion you do, it is the difference between an awkward email and starting the whole thing again from nothing.
Tailtap builds on Payload, which is open source, and the client keeps the data and the licence. That is a preference, and it comes with trade-offs. A licensed platform with a solid local company behind it who answer the phone beats an open-source stack with nobody to ring. What matters is knowing which of those you are buying, and having the answer written down somewhere other than a sales meeting.
A test for the quotes you hold
An hour at the kitchen table and two emails. Nobody gets hired and no money changes hands.
Lay the quotes side by side and mark every line that appears on one and not on the other.
Put a sheet of paper over the prices while you do it. The lines appearing only once are where the two companies disagree about what the job is, and that disagreement is the choice actually in front of you.
Circle every line containing a noun you cannot picture.
Discovery, strategy, information architecture, brand workshop, content audit. Email both companies the circled list with one question: what will I be able to read or use when this line is finished?
Find out how many pages your current site has.
Type your domain followed by /sitemap.xml into a browser, or ask whoever hosts it. Send the number to both companies and ask who moves those pages, and what it costs if the number turns out to be double.
Ask each company to name the software an enquiry sits in the morning after it is sent.
You want the name of a product, and you want to know who retypes anything by hand.
Ask who holds the CMS licence twelve months after launch, and what a year of running the site costs with four staff able to log in.
In writing. A company that will not put an annual figure in writing has told you roughly what the annual figure is.
Read the cheaper quote and write down what it does not do.
If you fill half a page, the two documents were for different jobs and there was never a price comparison to be made. If you struggle to reach three lines, they are quoting the same job at two prices and you should take the cheaper one.
Send both emails on the same afternoon and give them a week. The company that answers the awkward one in its own words, without a meeting attached, has told you more than either document managed to.
The short version
- 1Two quotes far apart in price have usually understood two different jobs. Neither document says which.
- 2The lines that hide the most work are discovery, the enquiry form, and content migration.
- 3Ask who holds the CMS licence and where the code lives, in writing, before you sign.
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