budgeting
How to compare three agency quotes that aren't comparable
A $22k quote and a $70k quote for the same brief usually describe different projects. How to normalise them onto one page and find out which.
You sent one brief to four agencies. You have quotes for $18k, $34k, $41k and $95k, and each one sounds reasonable while you’re reading it.
The spread is not a comedy of markups. It usually means the brief left something genuinely open, and four experienced teams made four different assumptions about it. Your job is to find out what that thing was — because until you do, you are not choosing between prices, you are choosing between scopes you can’t see.
Put them on one page
Take a single table and fill it from the proposals. Anything you can’t fill in is a question, and the blanks are the most valuable output.
| A | B | C | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design: original or themed? | ||||
| Number of unique templates | ||||
| Rounds of revision included | ||||
| Integrations named | ||||
| Content/data migration included? | ||||
| QA: who, and on what devices? | ||||
| Post-launch support included | ||||
| Named team, or unnamed? | ||||
| Payment schedule | ||||
| Start date and duration |
Nine times out of ten, two rows explain most of the spread: design origin and integrations.
The four questions that collapse the range
“Is the design original, or a customised theme?”
This is usually the single biggest line. An original design — research, wireframes, a component system, states and breakpoints — is a different discipline from configuring a premium theme well. Both are legitimate. A store doing $30k a month rarely needs the first.
A quote that doesn’t say which it is has not been read carefully by either party.
“Which integrations are in, by name?”
Ask every agency to list them explicitly: ERP, 3PL, subscriptions, tax, reviews, ESP, loyalty, PIM. Then compare the lists. A cheap quote is often cheap because it assumed your ERP sync was out of scope, and it may well be right — but you want that decided, not assumed.
Then ask the follow-up that matters: who pays if the API turns out to be worse than documented? The honest answer is “we’ll estimate it once we’ve seen it”, and an agency that has been burned will say so.
“What happens in the four weeks after launch?”
Some quotes end at go-live. Some include a snagging period. Some include a month of post-launch support. That difference alone can be $5k–$15k, and it is the period when you will need help most.
“Who is doing the work, and on what?”
Not to be difficult — to understand the number. A quote from a three-person studio where a principal writes the code, and a quote from a forty-person agency with a project manager, a QA lead and an account director, are pricing genuinely different things. Neither is wrong. The larger one buys process and continuity; the smaller one buys seniority per pound.
Decide which you need before you decide which you can afford.
What the outliers usually mean
The lowest quote. Sometimes a specialist who has built this exact thing nine times and knows precisely how long it takes — the best value on the list. Sometimes a misread brief. You can tell them apart in one call: ask what the three hardest parts of your project are. The specialist names them immediately. The misread quote describes your homepage.
The highest quote. Sometimes a team that priced the integration work honestly while everyone else deferred it. Sometimes a shop that doesn’t want the job and has quoted accordingly, which is a polite no worth accepting.
The one that came back with questions instead of a number. Usually the strongest signal on the list.
Don’t compare hourly rates
Hourly rate tells you almost nothing. A $180/hour team that needs 120 hours is cheaper than a $95/hour team that needs 300, and the first one is also finished two months sooner. What you’re buying is a delivered outcome; compare total cost, duration, and what’s included.
Where the rate does matter is out-of-scope work, because that is the number you’ll be paying at when something changes. Ask for it separately and get it in writing.
Before you sign
Once you’ve chosen, the contract does the rest of the work. What to check before you sign covers ownership, accounts and the exit clause — the three things that decide what you’re left holding if the project goes sideways.
And if you want a second opinion on a shortlist you’ve already built, that’s what the matching service is for. It’s free, and we’ll tell you if we think one of your three is the right answer.
