Project Scoper
Three quotes that differ by four times usually means three people were asked three different questions. This turns a vague idea into a written brief you can send to all of them unchanged — and tells you what any of them will ask you next.
Roughly how long
1–2 weeks
8 days for a website = 8 days, then ±25% because a single figure is a promise nobody can keep.
That is how long we would budget for this, working from the list above. It is not a survey of what anyone else takes, and it is not a quote.
Send this to everyone you ask. Three quotes are only comparable if all three were asked the same question — which is usually the real reason they come back so far apart.
PROJECT BRIEF
What we want: A website — Pages that explain what you do and get people to make contact.
It needs to include:
(nothing beyond the basics yet — see the questions below)
Explicitly NOT in scope:
- You need the design done, not just the build
- You need the words written
- More than about eight pages or templates
- Customers log in and have accounts
- Taking payments online
- It has to talk to software you already use
- Existing data or content has to come across
- More than one language
- You want to edit it yourself afterwards
- It needs to be found in search
Please confirm in your quote:
- Who writes the words, and when they will be ready.
- Who supplies photographs, and whether they are licensed for your use.
- Whether an existing site's addresses need to keep working afterwards.
- What happens after launch — fixes, changes, hosting, and who pays for them.
- Who owns the code and the accounts when it is finished.
We can answer these:
- What does success look like six months after launch?
- What are you using now, and what specifically is wrong with it?
- Who inside your business will own this once it is live?
- Is there a date this has to be ready for, and what happens if it slips?
- What is the budget range you are working within?
(Scope worked out with the free tool at https://debugswift.com/tools/project-scoper — no prices attached, it just writes down what was asked for.)The obvious question
We don't publish prices, and we'd rather say why than put a number on a page that turns out to be wrong for you.
Two projects with the same tick-list can differ several times over. Whether your content exists yet, whether the system it has to connect to has a usable interface, whether decisions take a day or a month — those move the number far more than the feature list does, and none of them fit in a form.
So the honest version is: work out the scope here, then have a twenty-minute conversation and get a fixed price for exactly that. Fixed price agreed before work starts. No hourly billing, no surprises.
If you're not sure the project is the right one to be doing at all, that's worth saying out loud too — it's what technical consulting is for, and it is a cheaper conversation than a build.
Common questions
Because any number it gave you would be made up. Two projects with identical tick-lists can differ several times over depending on what your content is like, what your existing systems are, and how quickly decisions get made — none of which a form knows. We quote after a conversation, at a fixed price agreed before work starts. A calculator that guessed would only be useful for making us look cheap until the real number arrived.
It writes down what you're asking for. The reason three quotes come back four times apart is almost never that one agency is greedy — it's that all three were asked a different question, and each filled the gaps with their own assumptions. Send the same brief to all three and the numbers become comparable.
They're what we would budget for each piece of work, and the tool shows the days each item adds so the total is something you can check rather than take on trust. They're a statement about how we work, not a survey of the industry — nobody has measured that, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
Yes, that's rather the point. Copy it and send it to whoever you like. A business that knows what it's asking for gets better work from everyone, including from the agency that isn't us.
Next
Twenty minutes on what you've just written down, and a number you can hold us to.
Fixed price agreed before work starts. No hourly billing, no surprises.