Why SME website quotes vary by 10x (and how to read one)
Three agencies, three quotes: £900, £4,500, £9,000. Not one of them is lying — they’re pricing different things. Here’s how to compare them honestly.
If you’ve asked three agencies for a quote on the same brief, you’ve probably received three numbers that look like they’re solving different problems. Usually, that’s because they are.
Where the variance actually lives
- Scope. “5 pages” and “up to 20 pages” are very different projects — often with very similar pitches.
- Agency overhead. A 30-person agency with a West End office has to cover rent before a single line of code is written. A small studio doesn’t.
- Template vs custom. Page-builder sites take days; custom code takes weeks. Both can look fine; they perform and scale very differently.
- Ownership. Some quotes include the design files and codebase on exit. Many don’t.
- Ongoing support. “3 months of support” is a number with almost no meaning until you define what “support” is.
Four questions that flush out the truth
Ask every agency the same four questions. If any of them need to “get back to you,” that tells you where the vagueness lives.
- What happens when I want to change the homepage hero in six months — included or extra?
- Who owns the code if I cancel, and when?
- What’s your typical Lighthouse score on the projects you’ve shipped this year?
- How much of this is template, and how much is custom?
“The cheapest quote isn’t the one with the smallest invoice — it’s the one with the smallest number of surprises.”
Compare on total 3-year cost
The one-off build is only part of the story. A £2,000 build plus £60/mo hosting plus £150/edit (three edits a month) runs you roughly £7,800 over three years. A £140/mo subscription with unlimited edits is £5,040 over the same period — and no-one ever tells you your new blog post “wasn’t in scope.”
Do that maths every time. It reframes pricing from “which quote is lowest” to “which model matches how we’ll actually use this site.”
What a Stratevo quote actually contains
We publish our pricing publicly: £89–£249/mo depending on tier, Enterprise negotiable. There is no setup fee, no “project management” line item, no extra charge for hosting, SSL, analytics, or edits (unlimited on Business and Premium). The quote is the invoice — every month, until you cancel.
If you’re weighing an agency quote against us, the honest comparison is 3-year total cost. Most agencies look cheaper on day one and more expensive over 36 months. Run the numbers on our pricing page, then compare apples to apples.