A few months back, a prospective client sent me two quotes side by side. One was $199 from someone on Fiverr. One was $9,000 from an agency in Auckland. Same brief, roughly. He asked me which one made sense.

The honest answer was: neither, probably. And figuring out why took longer than I expected, so I want to actually write it out.

The $199 quote is usually a template with your logo on it

Here's what $199 buys you, most of the time. A theme - Divi, Elementor, some WordPress starter kit - with your colors swapped in and your logo dropped into the header. Stock photos. A contact form plugin. Maybe two rounds of "make the button bigger" before the developer stops responding.

I'm not saying this to be snobby about templates. Templates exist for a reason and sometimes they're genuinely the right call - if you need something up in 48 hours and you're not trying to differentiate on design, fine. But the person paying $199 usually thinks they're getting a custom site, and they're not. They're getting a very fast reskin, and the price reflects the two or three hours of actual labor involved.

The tell is always the same: ask what happens when something breaks in six months. Usually there's no answer, because there was never a plan for that conversation.

The $9,000 quote is usually paying for an office lease you'll never see

This is the part that took me longer to understand, because it's less obvious from the outside. A serious agency quote for a business site - nothing exotic, just a proper multi-page site with some custom design work - often runs into the thousands. And it's not because the work itself costs that much.

It's because that $9,000 is paying for a lot of things that have nothing to do with your website. Rent on an office in a city where commercial rent is expensive. A project manager whose entire job is translating between you and the developer, adding a full communication layer that didn't need to exist. A sales team that closed the deal before a single line of code got written. Profit margins stacked at every one of those layers.

None of that is evil. It's just... not your website. You're subsidizing someone's Auckland office lease, and the actual development work inside that $9,000 quote might genuinely be worth $1,500 to $2,000.

So, what's the actual price of a website

Somewhere between those two numbers is what the work is actually worth - and that number is mostly determined by two things: how custom it is, and how much of the underlying complexity is real versus decorative.

A clean, custom-built five- or six-page business site, done properly - real design decisions, no theme, built to load fast and actually rank - sits somewhere in the $300–600 range if the person building it isn't padding for overhead they don't have. That's not a race-to-the-bottom number. It's what real, focused labor from one competent person costs when there's no agency tax on top of it.

A booking platform with a custom admin panel, payment integration, and a relational database designed around your actual business logic is a different animal entirely -that's genuinely $1,000+ of real engineering work, not because someone's inflating it, but because the complexity is real. I've built five of these now, and the ones that took real time took real time because the problem was actually hard, not because I was padding hours.

The number itself matters less than whether you can tell what's driving it.

The actual question to ask

Not "what's your price," but "what determines your price." A developer who can walk you through why a project costs what it costs - this part is templated, this part is custom, this feature adds real backend complexity, this one doesn't - is telling you something true. A developer who just gives you a number with no shape to it either hasn't thought about it or doesn't want you looking too closely.

I price my own work the way I'd want to be priced as a client: the actual labor, minus the overhead I don't have because I'm not renting an office in a city with expensive rent. That's not charity. It's just what happens when you cut out the layers that don't touch the code.

If you're comparing quotes right now and one number feels too good and another feels absurd, you're probably not crazy. Ask both of them to explain the number. The answer tells you more than the number does.