Why quotes for the same brief vary by 10×
Send an identical brief to five suppliers and you will get £2,000 to £40,000 back. That spread is not dishonesty. It is that “a website” describes anything from a themed template with your logo to a bespoke application that happens to render in a browser.
The way to compare is to stop comparing totals and start comparing what is being built: how many unique templates, how much of the design is original, what it integrates with, and who writes the content.
The bands, and what genuinely sits in each
| Band | What you get | Realistic timeline |
|---|---|---|
| £1,500–£3,000 | Template, light customisation, your content poured in | 2–4 weeks |
| £3,000–£8,000 | Custom-styled theme, 5–10 templates, CMS, basic SEO | 4–8 weeks |
| £8,000–£25,000 | Original design, bespoke build, integrations, content support | 8–14 weeks |
| £25,000–£75,000 | Logins, payments, custom functionality, multiple systems | 3–6 months |
| £75,000+ | A web application with a website attached | 6 months+ |
What actually drives the price
- Unique templates, not pages. Two hundred blog posts using one template is cheap. Twelve pages that each look different is not.
- Integrations. Every external system is design, build, error handling and testing. Two integrations often cost more than ten extra pages.
- Original design versus adapted. Bespoke design is typically 30–40% of a project in this range.
- Content. If the agency writes it, add meaningfully. If you write it, budget your own weeks — this is the most common cause of delay.
- Approval complexity. A committee of six will add a month, and no proposal will say so out loud.
The line items people forget
Hosting and domains, ongoing maintenance and security updates, licences for premium plugins or components, professional photography, copywriting, and the third-party services the site depends on.
Budget 15–20% of the build cost annually for maintenance. A site nobody updates is a security incident on a delay, and the eventual emergency costs more than the maintenance would have.
Expensive versus overpriced
Expensive means genuinely more work: original design, real integration, proper testing, accessibility, performance budgets. Overpriced means the same template work with a bigger number attached.
Three questions separate them quickly. How many unique templates are in the estimate? Which parts are bespoke and which are configured? What happens to the price if we cut feature X? A supplier who answers all three crisply is pricing work; one who deflects is pricing you.
How to get comparable quotes
- Give every supplier the same written brief, including your integrations and content situation
- Ask for the price broken into design, build, content and integration
- Ask what is explicitly out of scope — the answer is more revealing than the inclusions
- Ask for two references with a similar budget, not their flagship project
- Ask who owns the code and the design files afterwards, and get it in writing