You have three quotes. One is three thousand dollars, one is eleven, one is twenty-six, and all three describe what sounds like the same website. That is not because someone is overcharging. It is because the quotes are for three different jobs and none of them say so.
The questions below are the ones that pull the differences into the open. Almost all of them are about the period after launch, because that is where the real cost of a website lives and it is the part a proposal is reliably silent about.
I am obviously not a neutral party here. I have written this so that it would still be useful if you go on to hire somebody else, which is most of the people who will read it.
1. Who owns the website when we are done?
The answer you want is that you own all of it: the domain, the hosting account, the files, the design, the content, the analytics property. In your name, on your credit card, with credentials in your possession.
The answer that should worry you is any version of “we host it for you” where the account is not yours. That is not a service, it is a hostage arrangement, and you find out it was one on the day you want to leave. The same goes for a design that is licensed to you rather than transferred, and for a domain registered by the agency “for convenience.”
Ask specifically: if I stop working with you tomorrow, what do I have, and what is in your name rather than mine?
2. Is there anything I have to keep paying for, for the site to keep working?
This is the question with the largest gap between what people assume and what is true. Many modern sites are assembled from licensed parts: a premium theme, a page builder, four or five paid plugins, a form service, a slider, a stock photo subscription. Every one of those is a renewal, and some of them stop working when the renewal lapses rather than merely stopping updates.
A good answer is a specific list with annual costs, or “nothing, it is all either included in the build or free software.” A bad answer is “just hosting,” followed a year later by an email about a license you did not know existed.
Ask for the list in writing before you sign, not because anyone is hiding it, but because most people quoting a website have never added it up themselves.
A website is not a purchase, it is a small ongoing obligation. The quote covers the purchase. The questions above cover the obligation.
3. Who is actually going to do the work?
You are being sold by the person in the meeting. You may not be built by them. In larger shops the sale is made by a director and the work is done by whoever is free that month, sometimes by a subcontractor two time zones away, and the thing you liked about the pitch does not survive the handoff.
This is not an argument that big is bad. A team can do things one person cannot, including answer the phone at two in the morning and absorb somebody getting sick. It is an argument for knowing which you are buying, because the failure modes are completely different and the price usually is not.
Ask: who writes the copy, who does the design, who writes the code, and will I meet them? Then ask what happens if that person leaves.
4. What happens if I want to stop halfway?
Projects end early. A budget gets cut, a merger happens, or it simply is not working. What you want to know is whether leaving is expensive by design.
A good answer sounds like: stop at the end of any phase, you keep everything produced to that point in files you can hand to someone else, and nothing further is owed. A bad answer involves a cancellation fee proportional to the remaining balance, or a clause where work in progress stays with the agency.
Read the deposit terms in the same light. Half up front is normal. Eighty percent up front, non-refundable, before any work is shown, is a structure designed around the possibility that you will want to leave.
5. What do you need from me, and when?
Every late website project I have ever seen was late for the same reason, and it is almost never the builder. It is a week waiting on photography, or a decision that needed someone who was on vacation, or six people who each needed to be heard.
A studio that has done this before will answer this question immediately and specifically: how many hours of your time, which people they need access to, what content and photography you have to supply, and the three or four dates where the schedule depends on you. A studio that says “not much, we handle everything” is either doing your thinking for you, which produces a site that sounds like nobody, or has not thought about it.
Ask the follow-up too: what happens to the timeline and the price if I am late? You want that answered before it happens rather than discovered in an invoice.
6. What is not included?
The most useful question on this list and the one almost nobody asks. Proposals are written as lists of what you get, which means the interesting information is the negative space.
Things that are commonly assumed and commonly excluded: copywriting, photography, redirects from your old URLs, migrating an existing blog, content entry beyond a few sample pages, training, e-commerce configuration, third-party integrations, accessibility remediation, and any revision past round two.
None of those are unreasonable exclusions. A website quote that included all of them would be enormous. The problem is only ever finding out later, so make someone say the list out loud.
7. Can I see something you built three years ago?
This is the one I would keep if I could only ask one.
Every portfolio is full of launches. A launch is a photograph taken on the best day of a site’s life, before any real content went in, before anyone on staff had to update it, before a plugin conflict or a PHP upgrade. Almost nothing in the industry shows you what happens after.
So ask for something three years old and then go look at it. Is it still there? Is it still fast? Has the client been able to add to it, or does the news section stop two months after launch? Does it look like a site being lived in or a site somebody abandoned?
The answer tells you more than any amount of design work, because it is the only evidence available about the thing you are actually buying, which is not a launch. It is the next several years.
What to do with the answers
You are not scoring anyone out of seven. Plenty of good studios will give you an awkward answer to one of these, usually number three, and plenty of bad ones have polished answers to all of them.
What you are listening for is whether the person answering has thought about it before you asked. A studio that has, will answer fast, specifically, and will volunteer the uncomfortable half without being pushed. A studio that has not will hedge, reframe the question, or tell you it depends.
Three questions in you will know which one you are talking to, and that is really what the exercise is for.
For the record, the way I answer all seven is written down rather than left for the call. Timeline, cost, phases, what I need from you and what happens if it goes wrong are on the approach page, including the parts that are not flattering. And the reason I can answer number seven is that every site in my portfolio belongs to a business I own, so I have not been able to walk away from any of them.
