Ask a few developers to quote the same website and the numbers can come back a long way apart. That is not because four of them are lying. It is because the word website covers everything from a single page you could build in an afternoon to a system that runs a business, and the brief almost never says which one it means.
What you are actually paying for
Almost none of the cost is the visible design. Most of it is the decisions: what happens when somebody submits that form twice, what the admin screen needs to do at 6pm on a Friday, which of the eleven things on the list actually have to exist in version one. A quote is really a bet on how many of those decisions are hiding in your brief.
- A brochure site with pages, a form and good structure is the simplest thing to price
- Anything with accounts, payments or a logged-in area is a different order of work
- Anything replacing an existing process is priced by the process, not the pages
Why cheap quotes get expensive
When one quote comes in well below the others, it is worth asking which reading of the brief it was priced against. It assumes the simplest interpretation of every ambiguous sentence, and every one of those assumptions becomes a change request later. You end up paying the difference, just in instalments and with worse feelings attached.
A fixed price is only meaningful if the scope it is fixed against is written down.
What to ask for
Ask for the scope in writing, ask what is explicitly not included, and ask what happens to the price if you change your mind in week three. Anyone who cannot answer those has not thought about your project yet. That is the actual signal, more than the number itself.
Written by Denney, a freelance developer based between Richmond and Kingston. If any of this applies to something you are planning, available for new projects.
