Why Website Quotes Have Not Caught Up With the Tools

Over the last few years the tools of this work have taken a large step forward. Work that took me a week in 2019 takes days now. Some of it takes an afternoon. You aren’t supposed to hear that from someone who builds websites for a living, so let me explain why I’m telling you.

What changed

The tedious parts of the job have been disappearing. Building out page layouts. Producing revision after revision. Resizing and adapting graphics for the tenth time. Custom illustration work that used to be a line item treasurers flinched at. The modern tools handle that drudgery at a speed that would have sounded like a joke a few years ago, and they improve every season.

The craft didn’t disappear. Knowing what a page should say, what to leave out, how a 75-year-old reader experiences a screen, and what your organization needs versus what merely looks impressive: that’s still judgment, and judgment still takes years. What disappeared is the labor between the judgment calls. Labor is what the big invoices were mostly billing for.

The prices didn’t change

Much of the industry adopted the tools and kept the 2015 price list. Faster work, same quote, wider margin, and a hope that clients wouldn’t do the math.

So if you’ve looked at a five-figure quote for a straightforward website and felt that something didn’t add up, trust that feeling. You were doing arithmetic.

The concrete version: a basic content website, the pages that tell your story, welcome your visitors, and take a contact message, with no online store, shouldn’t cost many thousands of dollars anymore. It doesn’t take what it used to take. The same goes for a modest set of graphics to go with it.

What still costs money

Some things didn’t get cheaper, because they were never about labor:

• Listening. Understanding your mission well enough to say it in a sentence takes conversation, and there’s no tool for that.
• Complexity that’s complex. Online stores, donation systems, member portals, custom integrations. That’s engineering, and it’s priced as engineering.
• Care over time. Updates, backups, and a person who answers. The monthly work is human attention, and it costs what attention costs.

My policy

When my tools get faster, your invoice gets smaller. It’s also why my flat quotes are sized the way they are. The productivity gain in this profession is real; the only question is who keeps it. I split it with my clients, because most of them are non-profits and I can think of better uses for the money than my margin. Which tasks the tools do and which stay by hand is laid out, line by line, on the tools policy page.

Holding a quote that seems heavy for the work described? Send it over. I’ll tell you what the job involves, free, and if the quote is fair I’ll say that too.