Comparing Design Agencies With No Public Prices

Most design studios will not put a price on their site, so you end up holding three proposals written in three different shapes with no way to line them up. The fix is to stop comparing the documents and start comparing five fixed things: what gets delivered, who does the work, how long it takes, what is excluded, and what a change costs. Any proposal can be reduced to those five lines. Once they are, the prices usually turn out to be further apart than the quality is.

This is a different job from choosing an agency in the first place. You have already decided all three could probably do the work. What you need now is a way to tell whether the cheapest one is cheap because it is efficient, or cheap because it is leaving something out.

Write down what you are buying before you read anything

Spend twenty minutes on one page of your own before you open the first proposal. List the pages or screens you need. Put the date you need them live. Name the person who will look after the site afterwards. Say what happens if it slips by two weeks.

Skip this and each proposal defines the project for you, which means three proposals define three different projects. Try the opposite. "A six page marketing site live by 15 November, built so our marketing hire can edit it without us." That one sentence usually makes one of the three obviously wrong before you have read a word of it.

Reduce every proposal to the same five lines

Deliverables. Count the things. "Brand refresh and new website" is not a count. Six unique page designs, two screen sizes, and one component library is a count. If you cannot count it, you cannot compare it.

People. Ask who designs and who builds, by name, and roughly how much of their week you get. A studio that answers "our team" is quoting you an average rather than a person.

Timeline. Calendar dates, not "four to six weeks". Mark the days you owe them feedback. Most projects that run late run late on client review time, not on studio time.

Exclusions. Copywriting, photography, illustration, SEO migration, CMS setup, browser testing. Every one of those is inside the price at some studios and outside it at others.

Change cost. What does one extra page cost after you sign, and what does a third round of revisions cost. The answer tells you how the project will feel in week five.

Put all three proposals in that shape and you are comparing prices for the same thing for the first time.

The four things a quote usually leaves out

The words. A site with no copy does not launch. Ask who writes it, and what happens to the timeline if your draft is late. This is the single most common reason a fixed date slips.

The build. Design files are not a website. Check whether the number covers building it in the actual platform, and whether that includes wiring up the CMS so new posts do not need a developer.

The handover. Can your team edit the site on their own afterwards. Is there a recorded walkthrough. If not, every small change becomes a paid request, and that cost never appears in the proposal.

The month after launch. Bugs surface in the first week of real traffic. Ask what is covered after go live and for how long.

Four questions that force a number

Ask what a project like yours has cost them in the past year, at the low end and the high end. They are describing finished work, not making a promise, so most studios will answer.

Ask what they would cut first if the budget were smaller. The answer shows you what they think is load bearing.

Ask their day rate, in case you need two extra days late in the project.

Then ask the one that matters. "If we signed today, what is the largest invoice we could send you that is not described in this document?" A studio that answers that plainly is a studio whose number you can trust.

What a refusal to quote actually means

Plenty of good studios price per project because the work genuinely varies. That is normal, and they will still give you a range within about thirty seconds of hearing the scope. A range is not a commitment and everyone knows it.

The signal worth noticing is different. It is a studio that will not name any figure until it has asked how much you raised. That order means the price is being set from your budget rather than from the work. You can still hire them. You just know now that the number you get is about you.

A published minimum is not proof of good work either. It only proves the number does not move based on who is asking, which is a smaller thing than it sounds but a useful one.

Weighing the numbers once you have them

Divide by a unit you care about. Cost for each unique page design, or cost for each week of senior time. A cheap proposal with a junior designer for eight weeks often costs more for each useful week than an expensive one with a senior for three.

Then add the cost you carry yourself. Your review time, writing the copy, running the project. A studio that needs four calls a week is more expensive than its invoice says, and a studio that sends one clear update is cheaper.

Last, look at the spread. If the highest and lowest are within about a third of each other, you are choosing on fit and you should pick the team you would rather talk to every Tuesday. If one is less than half of another, somebody has misread the scope. Find out which one before you decide, because it is as likely to be the expensive one as the cheap one.

The rule for the final call

Pick the proposal that describes your problem most accurately, not the one that describes the agency most impressively. A document that repeats your constraints back in its own words, names the risk you were already worried about, and still puts a number at the bottom is the work of somebody who has done this before.

If you would rather start from a list than a method, our rated shortlists record pricing disclosure and an honest weakness for every studio, including landing page studios working with YC backed AI startups. For the earlier step, picking which three studios to ask at all, there is how to choose a web design agency, and how long design projects actually take if your date is the binding constraint.

We quote in one of two shapes, a fixed scope of three to four weeks or a monthly retainer, and we will tell you on the first call whether we are the wrong fit. If that is useful, book a 30 minute call and bring the four questions above.