Being Quoted Three Very Different Prices

What the spread usually means

Three suppliers, one brief, and quotes separated by a factor of four or five.

The instinct is that somebody is overcharging, and occasionally somebody is.

Far more often the three suppliers read the same brief and formed different pictures of the job, because the brief did not settle the questions that determine the price.

Which means the spread is diagnostic. It is telling you that your brief was ambiguous, and that is worth knowing before you choose.

Compare inclusions, not totals

The exercise that resolves this, and it takes about an hour.

Draw a table with one row per item and one column per supplier: discovery, design, build, content, photography, integrations, testing, training, launch, and post-launch support.

Mark each cell included, excluded, or unclear.

The unclear cells are your question list, and there will be more of them than you expect.

By the time the table is complete the price differences usually explain themselves, and the comparison becomes a decision about scope rather than about cost.

Where the difference actually sits

• Content: written for you, or supplied by you.
• Photography: commissioned, stock, or yours.
• Discovery: days of thinking, or none.
• Design: original, or a configured template.
• Integrations: booking, payment, stock, accounting.
• Testing: devices, accessibility, and who does it.
• Support: included for a period, or billed from day one.

The first two account for most of the gap in most comparisons, and both are frequently assumed rather than stated.

The questions that separate them

Five, asked of every supplier, in writing.

Who writes the text, and how many pages does your price assume.

Where do the photographs come from.

What is explicitly not included.

What happens if it takes longer than planned, and who bears that.

And what does the first year cost in total, including hosting and anything recurring.

Send the same five to all three and compare the answers rather than the proposals, since proposals are written to persuade and answers to direct questions are more comparable.

A worked example

A firm received quotes of roughly four thousand, eleven thousand, and twenty-six thousand for the same twelve-page brief.

The table took an hour.

The lowest assumed all content and images supplied, a configured theme, no discovery, and support billed hourly from launch.

The middle included original design, four days of content work, client photographs, and three months of support.

The highest included a week of discovery with customer interviews, full copywriting, a photography day, a booking integration nobody had mentioned in the brief, and a year of support.

The booking integration was the discovery. Only one supplier had noticed that the business took appointments by phone and had priced solving it.

They took the middle quote and added the integration separately, having learned about it from a proposal they did not accept.

The lowest quote is not always the cheapest

The arithmetic worth doing before deciding.

Add to each quote what you will have to spend separately to reach the same finished position: a copywriter, a photographer, your own hours writing, and support in the first year.

A four thousand dollar quote plus thirty pages you write yourself is not four thousand dollars. It is four thousand plus several weeks of your time, and that time has a value and a completion risk.

Sites stall at the content stage more than at any other, and a quote that shifts content to you has moved the most likely point of failure onto the party least equipped to handle it.

Sometimes that is the right trade. It should be a decision rather than a discovery in month four.

What a good proposal contains

Worth recognising, because it is a signal about the supplier independent of price.

A restatement of the problem in their words, showing they understood it rather than repeating your brief back.

Assumptions, listed explicitly.

Exclusions, listed explicitly.

A sequence with rough timings and what is needed from you at each stage.

And at least one question or challenge to the brief, since a supplier who accepted everything without querying anything either did not read it carefully or is not going to tell you when you are wrong.

Price is not the main risk

The consideration that should carry the most weight and usually carries the least.

The expensive failure is not paying too much. It is a project that stalls, arrives late, arrives thin, or produces something nobody can update.

Which makes delivery risk the thing to assess: have they done this kind of work before, can you speak to two clients from the last year, who is actually doing the work, and what happens if that person leaves.

Ask for references and call them. Very few buyers do, and the conversation is usually candid and takes ten minutes.

A supplier at the middle price with two good references is a better bet than a cheaper one with none.

The counter-case

There is a limit to how much analysis a small purchase deserves.

For a modest site, an hour of comparison and two phone calls is proportionate, and a week of evaluation is not, since the difference in outcome does not justify the delay.

Nor is more quotes better. Three is enough to see a spread and understand what causes it. Six produces a spreadsheet and a decision no better made.

And where you already know and trust a supplier who has done comparable work, a single quote you understand is a reasonable basis for proceeding.

The exercise here is for the situation it describes: three quotes, wide apart, and no obvious reason why.

How to decide

1. Build the inclusion table before reading any total.
2. Send the same five questions to all three.
3. Add what each leaves you to buy separately.
4. Count your own hours in the cheap option.
5. Note who challenged the brief.
6. Call two references for the shortlist.
7. Decide on delivery risk, then on price.

Step one usually collapses a confusing comparison into an obvious one, and it is the step almost nobody performs.

Briefs that cannot be priced are covered in the quote request that cannot be quoted.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.