By Brian Christie
The pattern repeats itself constantly
Owner gets three quotes for a website. Picks the cheapest. Six months later the site is broken, nobody answers the phone at the company that built it, and they’re paying someone else to rebuild from scratch. Total cost: the cheap quote plus the rebuild, which is more than the middle quote would have been.
Where cheap quotes cut corners
1. No responsive design (looks fine on the laptop they showed you, breaks on every phone).
2. No SEO foundation (looks like a website, invisible to Google).
3. No ownership transfer (you don’t actually own the domain, the hosting, or sometimes even the design files).
4. No maintenance plan (the site slowly degrades and nobody’s watching).
What to actually compare
Not the number, the scope. What’s included, what’s not, who owns what when it’s done, and what happens six months later when something needs changing. Two quotes at $3,000 and $5,000 might cover wildly different scopes, and the $3,000 one might cost you $8,000 total once the gaps show up.
The real cost is always total cost of ownership
Build plus maintenance plus fixes plus the revenue lost while the cheap version wasn’t converting. Run that math honestly before picking the lowest number.
Want a quote that actually includes everything? That’s how our web design service scopes every project.
