Why one quote is $200 and another is $4,000

One brief, five replies, and the cheapest is a fifteenth of the dearest. It is the most common thing people write to us about, and the instinctive reading — that four of them are overcharging, or that one of them is a scam — is usually wrong. The spread is real, it is explainable, and understanding where it comes from is the difference between choosing well and choosing by price.

What the cheap number is actually pricing

We track outcomes on posted projects to understand market conditions. Across 13,343 of them with usable bid data, the competition looks like this:

Now look at what those bids say. On 6,063 dollar-denominated projects the average-bid distribution runs: $25 at the lower quartile, $107 at the median, $348 at the upper quartile, $557 at the ninetieth percentile.

A median of $107 for a website is not a price. Nobody builds a website for $107. What that number represents is the cost of entering an auction with fifteen other people in it, where the bid is a bid for attention rather than a costing of the work. The strategy behind it is well understood: bid low enough to get a conversation, then discover during the conversation that the real scope is larger. Sometimes that is deliberate. More often it is simply what happens when a price is set before anyone has read the brief properly.

The four scopes hiding in one brief

When a brief is underspecified — and most are — each supplier fills the gaps with their own defaults. The quotes then differ because the jobs differ, not because the opinions do. In practice the spread decomposes into four questions the brief did not answer:

• Is the design original, or a theme with your logo dropped into it? This alone accounts for most of the gap between a few hundred and a few thousand.
• Who writes the content? A quote that assumes you supply finished copy and images is not comparable to one that includes writing it.
• Is the site editable by you afterwards, or does every change come back to the supplier as billable work? The second is cheaper to build and far more expensive to own.
• What happens after launch — is anything included, and for how long?

How to compare them properly

Line up the quotes and ignore the totals for a moment. Ask each supplier the same five questions in writing, and compare the answers rather than the prices:

1. What is explicitly excluded? A quote with no exclusions section has not been thought through, whatever it costs.
2. Who owns the finished site, the code, the domain and the hosting account? If the answer is anything other than you, the price is not the price.
3. What does a small change cost in month four — a new page, a price update, a new team member's photo?
4. What is the licence and renewal position? Bundled first-year licences that renew at full price are the most common year-two surprise.
5. What is the handover? A login and a fifteen-minute call is not the same deliverable as documentation and a trained editor.

Once those five are answered, the totals usually stop being twenty-fold apart, because you are finally comparing the same thing. Often the cheap quote grows to meet the others as its exclusions surface, and occasionally a mid-priced one turns out to include work the expensive one had as an extra.

When cheap is genuinely correct

None of this argues that expensive is better. A five-page brochure site for a business that will never edit it, on a theme, with copy the owner writes themselves, genuinely is a small job and should be priced like one. The failure mode is not paying too little; it is paying a small-job price for a project that was never a small job, and discovering the difference in month three when the money is already spent.

The honest test is whether the supplier's price and their questions match. Someone quoting a few hundred who asked nothing has priced a guess. Someone quoting a few hundred after asking who writes the copy and what happens at renewal has priced a small job accurately, and that is a different proposition entirely.