Why the cheapest quote usually costs the most

A cheap website is not a worse version of an expensive one. It is a different product with different economics, and the difference appears on a predictable schedule.

What gets removed to reach a low price

Nobody works for free, so a very low quote means something has been left out. Usually, in this order: discovery, copywriting, custom design, testing, accessibility, performance work and documentation. What remains is a template populated with whatever text you supplied.

Month three

You want a page that the template does not have. It is quoted as custom work, because it is. The saving starts eroding.

Month eight

The site is slow because it loads a builder, a slider, a font library and eleven plugins. Fixing it properly means rebuilding the theme. Fixing it cheaply means another plugin.

Year two

Search traffic is flat because nobody wrote the pages that would rank. This is the largest hidden cost and the hardest to see, because you cannot miss enquiries you never received.

Year three

Rebuild. The template is abandoned, the plugins conflict, and the fastest route to a modern site is to start again.

The five-year arithmetic

• Cheap route: €900 build, €1,800 of patches, €2,500 rebuild in year three. Roughly €5,200, with two years of underperformance in the middle.
• Considered route: €4,500 build, €600 a year of maintenance. Roughly €7,500 over five years, with a site that worked throughout.

The gap is smaller than it looks at signing, and the outcomes are not comparable.

When cheap is genuinely right

Validating an idea. A site with a twelve-month life. A business whose customers arrive entirely by word of mouth. In those cases pay little deliberately, and do not pretend it is an investment.

How to read a quote

Ignore the total; read the line items. If there is no line for content, no line for testing and no line for what happens after launch, those things are not happening — and they are the ones that decide whether the site earns anything.