Why Nobody Will Give You A Price For A Website

You ask four people what a website costs. Three of them want to book a call first. The fourth gives you a number so low you assume something is wrong with it, and you're probably right.

This is not a coincidence and it isn't shyness. There are reasons the industry works this way, some of them legitimate and some of them not, and it's worth knowing which is which before you sit through another thirty-minute call that ends in a proposal you can't compare to anything.

The legitimate reason

Websites genuinely vary. A one-page site for a mobile detailer and a booking system for a gym with four locations are different jobs by a factor of ten, and quoting the second at the price of the first would be dishonest in the other direction.

So there's a real problem here: "what does a website cost" is a bit like "what does a vehicle cost." The honest answer starts with a question.

That's a fair reason to want a conversation. It is not a fair reason to refuse to publish anything at all — because the same problem exists for builders, mechanics and lawyers, and plenty of them manage to tell you a starting figure or an hourly rate without the world ending.

The less legitimate reason

The other reason for the call is that the price is going to depend on you.

Not on the work. On what the firm thinks you can pay. A dentist and a landscaper asking for the same five-page site get different numbers, because one of them looks like they have more money. This is standard practice, it is taught openly as "value-based pricing," and it is why the discovery call comes first — the call is partly scoping and partly assessment.

You can usually tell it's happening by the questions. Scoping questions are about the work: how many pages, do you take bookings, who writes the copy. Assessment questions are about you: what's your annual revenue, what's a customer worth to you, what did you spend last time. Some of that has legitimate uses. All of it also tells them what to charge.

The third reason, which is just friction

There's a simpler thing going on too. Every additional step between you and a price is a step where you might drop out — which sounds bad for them, but the ones who don't drop out are much more likely to buy. Making you fill in a form, then take a call, then wait for a proposal, then take a second call, is a filter. By the time you've done all that you're invested, and people who are invested say yes more often.

It works. It's also a system designed around their conversion rate rather than your afternoon.

What I do instead, and why

My prices are on a page. One thousand five hundred, four thousand, fifteen thousand and up. Same for everyone, not adjusted for how the call goes or how your business looks.

I'd like to claim this is pure principle. Some of it is self-interest, and I'd rather be straight about that: if your budget is four hundred dollars, publishing the number means you find that out in ten seconds instead of after a scheduling link, a thirty-minute call and a written proposal. That's ten seconds of your time and about two hours of mine, and neither of us spent it discovering something a number on a page could have told us.

The rest of it is that I'm one person and I don't have a sales process to protect. A bigger firm has people whose job is to run that funnel. I don't, so the funnel is a page.

What still genuinely needs a conversation

I'm not claiming every project can be priced off a page, and it would be a bit rich to write this post and then pretend otherwise.

The first two packages are fixed because the scope is fixed. A one-page site is a one-page site. Five pages with booking wired in is a known quantity, and I've written elsewhere about what actually moves the number.

The third one — customer accounts, payments, a database, the kind of thing CageList is — genuinely can't be priced without talking, because the range is enormous and the requirements are usually half-formed at the start. What I can commit to is that the number arrives in writing before anything starts, and that it doesn't move afterwards unless you ask for something that wasn't in it.

How to get a real answer out of anyone

If you're talking to people who won't publish a price, here's how to get something useful anyway.

Ask for a range, and say you understand it's a range. "I'm not asking for a quote, I'm asking whether you're a two-thousand-dollar shop or a twenty-thousand-dollar shop." Most people will answer that. Anyone who won't is telling you something.

Ask what the last three projects like yours cost. Not a promise, just history. Evasiveness here is its own answer.

Ask what would make it cost more. A good answer is specific — more pages, payments, accounts, a migration. A vague answer means the number is coming from somewhere other than the work.

Ask what happens after launch, and what that costs. This is where surprise money lives. An unanswerable question here is a bigger red flag than the build price.

Volunteer nothing about your budget until you have a number. Not because anyone's a villain, but because "what's your budget" asked before a price is a question about you and not about the work.

The thing worth remembering

A published price isn't automatically a good price. Someone could publish a number and be twice what they're worth. What a published price does is let you compare, and comparing is the thing the whole discovery-call structure quietly prevents.

So the test isn't "did they tell me a number." It's "could I work out what I'd be paying without giving up an afternoon to find out."

If you want to see how this works when the number's just sitting there: the packages are here, what each one includes is written out, and if you describe what you're after you'll get a written scope with a price and a date before you've paid anything. If the answer is that I'm too expensive, you'll know that today rather than next Thursday. And if you're not even sure a website is the right thing to buy, start there instead.