How to compare website quotes that look nothing alike
Three studios, one request, three very different prices. How to find out what each quote is really building, and the short email that makes them comparable.
November 12, 2026Last updated November 12, 2026
“Is one of them lying?” It’s a fair question. You asked three studios for the same website and got back three PDFs. One costs about as much as a used car, one about as much as a new one, and the third is in a range you’d normally discuss with a bank.
Usually nobody is lying. Each studio read your request, pictured a different website and priced the one it pictured. The trick is finding out which three websites you were quoted, and that takes about an afternoon with a spreadsheet and one short email.
Line up what each one is actually building
Put the three quotes side by side and ignore the totals for a minute. Make a simple table with one row per question and one column per studio. Then go through each PDF and fill in what it says, or leave the cell blank where it says nothing.
Start with the rows that move prices most. They tend to be these:
- How many distinct page designs they’re making.
- Who writes the words.
- Who sources the photos.
- Whether the content gets moved over from your old site or left to you.
- Which extras are included, like donations, event sign-ups or a second language.
The blank cells are the interesting part. A quote can be cheaper because it assumes you’ll do half the work. That’s a perfectly good deal if you know about it in advance and a terrible one if you find out in month two.
The line item that hides in plain sight
Here is how month two tends to go. The design is approved, everyone loves it and the studio asks for the content. Someone points out that the old site has a hundred and forty pages, and the quote said migration was “client responsibility.” The development coordinator’s Friday afternoons now belong to copy and paste. Some of those pages haven’t been read since a different executive director wrote them.
None of that is the studio’s fault. It was in the quote, in a sentence nobody noticed. Content is where most of the gap between low and high quotes lives, because writing and moving words takes real hours and someone has to do them.
Ask each studio to say plainly who does each part. Writing new pages, editing old ones, moving them over and deciding which ones to retire are four different jobs. Expect a quote that covers all four to cost more than one that covers none.
A template is a different product, and sometimes the right one
The lowest quote is often a theme with your logo and colors on it. For some organizations that’s exactly right, especially a small group with a few pages and no one to maintain anything complicated.
It’s worth knowing, though, because a template decides your layout for you. The day you need a page it wasn’t built for, like a campaign with its own story or a program directory with filters, someone has to bend it. Bending costs money too, just later.
The higher quotes usually include research, a design made for your audience and a build made for that design. Ask each studio to show you a past project at their quoted price. Their best project ever is a fine thing to admire, and a poor guide to what your budget buys.
Find out who will actually do the work
Two quotes can describe the same process and be staffed very differently. In one, the person you met leads the project and a small team builds it. In another, the person you met hands you to an account manager and the build goes to a contractor you never speak to.
The difference shows up in small moments. A program director notices on a Tuesday that the volunteer form sends people to a dead page. In the first setup, she texts the person who built it and it’s fixed by lunch. In the second, she opens a ticket, the account manager forwards it, and the contractor gets to it on Thursday, along with a question about which form she meant.
Either can work, and the second can be one reason a price is lower. You just want to know before you sign. Ask who your weekly contact will be, who designs, who builds, and whether any of the work is sent out to another company. If the studio says “our team,” it’s fair to ask for names.
Check two things most quotes skip
Accessibility is the first. A site should work for someone using a screen reader or navigating with a keyboard, and there is a public standard for that. The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 define “how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities”. Ask whether each quote builds and tests to that standard, and at what level. If one studio includes it and another doesn’t mention it, your two prices aren’t describing the same site.
Search promises are the second. If a quote guarantees a top ranking on Google, read that line twice. Google’s own help page on hiring search help says it flatly: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” A studio that promises it is either confused or hoping you are. Good quotes describe the technical groundwork they’ll do, like clean page structure, sensible addresses and redirects from your old pages, and leave rankings out of their promises.
Ask what happens the day after it goes live
Some quotes end at launch. Others include training, a few months of fixes, hosting or a monthly plan. Two prices that look far apart can end up close once you add the year after launch, and two that look close can drift apart.
Add a row to your table for each of those, and another for what happens if you want to leave. Can you take the site with you, and in what form? We wrote about how these costs build up in the real cost of a website shows up in year three.
The short email that makes quotes comparable
Once your table has its blank cells, send the same short email to all three studios. Keep it to these questions so the replies line up:
- Who writes the content, and who moves it from the old site?
- Is the design made for us, or adapted from a theme?
- Who will we talk to every week, and who builds it?
- Does the build follow WCAG 2.2, and how do you test it?
- What will we pay in the first year after launch, all in?
The answers tend to explain the gap faster than another meeting would. If one studio can’t answer them clearly, you’ve learned something useful about that studio too.
What to do once the gap makes sense
Sometimes the cheapest quote turns out to be the right one, because it covers exactly what you need and your team has time for the rest. Sometimes the most expensive quote is padded with things you’ll never use. The table lets you see which is which, and it gives your board something more useful than three totals.
A few mistakes to avoid at this stage. Don’t ask the expensive studio to match the cheap one’s price without changing the scope, because something will quietly disappear. Don’t pick based on the prettiest PDF. And call one past client from each finalist, asking whether the project finished on budget and whether they’d hire the studio again.
If you haven’t sent a request yet, writing a website RFP that works will save you some of this sorting.
For a general sense of ranges, start with what a website costs. If you have quotes in hand and want a neutral read, book a 30-minute call and we’ll go through them with you line by line.
