Web Design Pricing: How to Read a Quote
5 min read
Ask what a website costs and the answers run from a few thousand to several hundred thousand, with everyone quoting sounding perfectly reasonable. The spread is not because somebody is lying. It is because "web design" covers wildly different amounts of work. The same spread shows up in the threads people cite on PTT and Dcard, the two large Taiwanese discussion boards, where one poster's cheap site and another's expensive one are both real prices for genuinely different jobs. This piece does not give you a number. It takes the price apart so you can read the quotes sitting on your desk. Amounts below are in New Taiwan dollars, written NT$, and describe the Taiwanese market. The way the comparison works holds anywhere; the figures do not.
1. Where the spread comes from
The same phrase "company website" can mean swapping the images and text on a template, or a system with member accounts, payments and a back-office workflow. The work differs by a factor of dozens, so the price does too. Four things drive it. Check what each of them is on a quote before you look at the number at the bottom.
The first is whether the design is made from scratch or adapted from a template. From scratch means concepts, revisions and a higher cost, but the layout is yours and nobody else has an identical one. A template is cheap and quick to deliver, at the cost of resembling other companies and being limited to whatever the template lets you change.
The second is the page count and, more to the point, the layout count. This is where most people miscount. Ten pages using three layouts is very different work from ten pages using ten. Home, about, product list, product detail and contact: if each is laid out differently, that is five layouts. Read a quote for its layout count, not its page count.
The third is custom functionality. Member accounts, bookings, payments, reporting, integration with an existing system: each carries its own development cost and does not get cheaper by sitting inside the same project. The fourth is who supplies the content. Whether the copy, photos and product data come from you or from the supplier often goes unwritten, and it causes more arguments than anything else on this list. The supplier assumes you will send it, you assume they will write it, and the schedule stops dead there.
2. The common price tiers
In the Taiwanese market, website builds mostly fall into the four groups below. This is an observed grouping rather than a market survey, and real quotes move a great deal with scope. Read the pricing basis and the trade-off columns rather than the label, because those two decide what you will have spent three years from now.
| Tier | How it is priced | Who it suits | The trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-service site builder | Monthly or annual subscription, no design or development labour included | Getting a front door up quickly, with someone willing to arrange the pages themselves | You can only move within what the platform allows, and the subscription never stops |
| Template build | One-off fee, quick delivery | A limited budget and a standard brochure site | The layout resembles other people's, and customisation is limited |
| Custom design build | One-off fee, usually quoted per project | Wanting a look of your own, with content you will keep developing | The widest price range of the four, because the scope varies the most |
| Custom system | Priced by number of features and complexity | Member accounts, payments, back-office workflow or integration with other systems | Normally far above a plain brochure site, and the schedule is longer |
LaiSecure quotes by project. The scope is agreed first, then the quote states the page count, the layout count, the feature list, the deliverables and the schedule, along with what is not included. Maintenance is a flat monthly fee: managed WordPress from NT$3,000 a month, managed server hosting from NT$5,000 a month. The one-off build and the monthly maintenance are quoted separately, so that comparing suppliers shows what the long run costs rather than only the first invoice.
3. The line items quotes leave out
A cheap quote often is not cheap. It has moved part of the cost somewhere you cannot see. These items usually do not appear on a quote, and not always because the supplier is hiding them: nobody asks, and writing them in makes the total look higher. So raising them is your job.
Do not ask open questions. "Does it include maintenance?" gets "yes it does", and you find out in month four that the yes meant three months. Ask "when does the warranty end and what does it cover?" instead. That forces a specific answer, and specific answers are the ones that can go into a contract.
Seven things to ask about item by item
- Domain and hosting. Included or not, for how many years, and who pays the renewal after that.
- SSL certificate. Who obtains it and who renews it. A missed renewal puts a browser warning in front of every visitor, and it happens to somebody every year.
- Who supplies copy and photos. Free stock images or licensed ones, and which uses the licence covers.
- Font licensing. Commercial font licences are not cheap, and using a font you have no licence for is a real legal exposure.
- Number and scope of revisions. Left vague, this turns into an endless loop, and that cost eventually shows up in how the work gets done.
- Warranty after launch. How long it runs, and whether it covers bug fixes only or content updates too.
- Ownership of the source code and the database. What you can actually take with you at handover, and in what format.
4. Three kinds of cheap that are not cheap
A price clearly below everyone else's rarely means the supplier is unusually efficient. It means the cost has moved. Where it moves is predictable, and the three below are the common ones. The right-hand column is the sentence to say before signing.
| The cheap approach | Where the cost actually sits | Ask this before signing |
|---|---|---|
| Platform lock-in | The build is cheap, a subscription then runs every year, and when you try to leave the data will not export in full | If I leave, what data can I take, and in what format? |
| Maintenance deferred to later | The first year of maintenance is free, and the monthly fee from year two is the real price | What does it cost per month from year two, and what does that cover? |
| Delivered and gone | The quote covers no support at all after launch, problems are billed separately, and nobody answers. Especially common at the low end | If I report a problem after launch, how quickly is it handled and how is it billed? |
The reverse holds as well: expensive does not mean good. Some quotes are high because several layers of people sit between you and the person doing the work, who is a subcontractor anyway. That premium buys you the layers, not the quality. Asking who executes, and whether you can talk to them directly, tells you more than staring at the number.
5. Three things to prepare before you compare
Send a loose requirement to three suppliers and you get three quotes for three different things, which cannot be compared at all. To compare, the requirement has to be pinned down first, in one document that every supplier sees. Half a day on this saves weeks of back and forth later.
First, separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves. The point is not only to inform suppliers. It is also for you: when the budget falls short, you need to know what can be dropped and what makes the project pointless once dropped. Give the same list to everyone and the quotes become comparable.
Second, find three websites you like and say what you like about each one. The colours, the sense of space, the way the product page is laid out. Examples communicate far more precisely than adjectives. Ask for "cleaner" or "more upmarket" and ten designers will produce ten different things.
Third, decide who updates the site after launch. If it is you, then how usable the admin area is becomes a real requirement, and it has to be stated before quoting. If nobody will, fold maintenance into the deal, because otherwise the site starts going stale six months in and the money gets spent anyway, just later.
There is no standard rate for web design, because the word "website" covers too many different things. Rather than asking other people what they paid, write down what you need and put the same document in front of three suppliers. Walk into that conversation holding a quote whose line items are separated and you are already better prepared than most buyers.
Common questions
- Why can quotes for the same company website differ tenfold?
- Because they cover different things. Template versus designed from scratch, custom features or none, who supplies the copy and photos, maintenance included or not: stack those together and the gap gets very wide. When you see an extreme spread, put the two quotes side by side line by line and the difference is usually obvious straight away.
- What is the price difference between an independent contractor and an agency?
- Mostly staffing structure and scale. An agency carries sales, project management and separate design roles, so its costs are higher, but it can also run more work at once. An independent supplier means fewer layers and usually a lower rate, at the cost of limited capacity. On a small project, talking directly to the person doing the work keeps the communication cost down. On a complex project under schedule pressure, a team is the safer bet.
- The quote says "website build, one set". Can we sign that?
- Not advisable. A lump sum leaves you nothing to test the delivery against, no way to settle a disagreement about scope, and nothing your bookkeeper can split. Ask for the page count, layout count, feature list, deliverables and schedule as separate lines, then sign. A supplier willing to write that down is usually easier to work with afterwards too.