It’s one of the most common questions I get from B2B business owners planning a new website.
“How can I send the same brief to five agencies and get quotes ranging from £2,000 to £20,000?”
At first glance, it looks daft. Surely, if everyone is quoting for the same project, the prices should be broadly similar. In reality, why website quotes vary so widely comes down to a handful of very specific reasons – and once you understand them, the price differences stop looking random and start making sense.
More importantly, for a B2B service business where your website is your primary lead-generation tool and increasingly your route to being found in AI search, understanding those differences before you sign anything could save you significant time, money and frustration.
- Why do website quotes vary?
- Hourly rates and overheads.
- Experience affects both the quote and the risk.
- What you are actually buying.
- The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest.
- Build quality and AI search visibility.
- How to compare website quotes properly.
- Other factors agencies consider.
- Do your due diligence.
- The budget conversation.
- How to get the right price.
Why do website quotes vary so much?
Most website quotes are built on two core numbers: the estimated number of hours and the hourly rate, which has the agency’s overheads baked into it.
If a project is expected to take 60 hours: at £60/hr the quote is £3,600; at £150/hr it’s £9,000; at £250/hr it’s £15,000. Before you even read the details of any proposal, you can see how the same brief produces very different numbers.
Hourly rates and overheads.
A freelancer working from a spare bedroom has very few fixed costs. Lower overheads, yes, but slower to deliver and with a hard limit on how many projects can run at once. An established agency with a full team has very different costs: studio space, salaries, project management, systems, infrastructure. That is reflected in the rate – but also in what you get: multiple disciplines, experience at scale, and a team that can deliver complex projects to deadline.
Experience affects both the quote and the risk.
A less experienced developer may quote fewer hours because they underestimate what the project involves, not because they are faster. That gap usually becomes your problem. An experienced agency knows what is involved. The quote reflects real-world delivery time, including discovery, planning, content iteration, testing and launch.
What you are actually buying.
At the lower end: an off-the-shelf theme configured and launched, a page builder site with your content dropped in, no content strategy, no SEO planning, no technical optimisation. At the higher end: a bespoke theme built from scratch, custom ACF blocks designed for your content model, on-page SEO and schema markup built in, performance optimisation and proper hosting setup, a site that is maintainable and built for the next five years.
The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest.
A £2,500 website that doesn’t perform in search, can’t be updated without breaking the layout, and needs replacing in 18 months has cost you significantly more than a £7,000 website that generates leads for five years.
Build quality and AI search visibility.
This is worth its own section because it is increasingly important. The build approach – page builder vs bespoke – has a direct effect on whether your site appears in AI-generated search results.
AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity read the HTML of your website. They look for clean structure, semantic markup, schema data and clear content hierarchy. A page builder site generates code that makes this harder. A bespoke build with custom ACF blocks produces clean, structured HTML that AI tools can read and cite.
When comparing quotes, ask specifically: will this use a page builder or a bespoke theme, how will the site be structured for AI search, will there be schema markup, and what will the PageSpeed score be at launch. An agency that cannot answer those questions directly is probably not the right choice.
How to compare website quotes properly.
Don’t compare total price. Compare what is included: is this a template site or a bespoke build, does it include SEO setup and schema, is AI search structure included or bolted on afterwards, what does ongoing support look like, and who actually does the work.
Other factors agencies consider.
Content provision, revision rounds, third-party integrations, accessibility requirements, timeline – all of these affect the quote. A clear brief gets a more accurate quote.
Do your due diligence.
Ask to see live sites they have built. Look at those sites’ PageSpeed scores. Ask ChatGPT about the businesses they have built for and see whether those sites appear. Ask how long they have been doing this and what their client retention rate is.
The budget conversation.
Be honest about budget. An agency that knows what you can spend can tell you what is realistic within that budget – and what corners they would have to cut. That is a more useful conversation than getting four quotes and trying to work out why they differ.
How to get the right price.
A clear brief gets a more accurate quote. If you can describe your pages, your functionality needs, your timeline and your budget range, you will get proposals that are actually comparable.
David Foreman
Dave is the MD at Toast has have over 25 years experience in designing and building websites that help deliver growth to businesses. He specialises in optimising websites to get found across organic and AI search channels.
