Why do websites cost so much when they clearly should not?

The suspicion is reasonable. A business owner looks at a five-page website, quoted at four thousand pounds, and thinks: this is a few pages of text and some photographs. What could possibly cost four thousand pounds?

The answer used to be "about three weeks of skilled labour", and it was true. It is much less true now, and the industry has been slow to say so.

Where the money used to go, honestly

A brochure site built in the traditional way involved a designer producing layouts, a developer building them, someone making everything work on phones, two or three rounds of revisions, and coordination between all of them.

The revisions were the killer. Moving a section, changing a headline, adding a page, each meant hand-editing code and re-testing. Clients were charged for rounds of changes because rounds of changes genuinely cost days. That is where a large share of a traditional quote actually went, and it is why "scope creep" was the industry's permanent complaint.

None of that was a scam. It was the real cost of a craft process.

What actually got cheap

Production. All of it.

Layout, build, responsive behaviour, and above all the revisions. The thing that used to take a day now takes minutes, which means the round of changes that used to be a chargeable event is now a conversation.

This is not a small efficiency. It is the largest line in the old quote falling away almost entirely. Any price that has not moved in response is being defended by inertia.

The four costs that are still real

Charging nothing would also be dishonest, because these did not go anywhere.

Research. Knowing what your customers actually search for, what your competitors already rank for, and what the internet currently says about your business. This is genuine work, it requires access to real data rather than guesswork, and it is the difference between a website that exists and one that gets found. Nothing about it got faster.

Verification. Checking that the contact form submits, that a crawler can read the page without JavaScript, that the canonical tags point at the right URLs, that the Google listing is claimed and consistent. Every one of these failures is invisible from the outside, which is exactly why they persist for years. This is the least glamorous line in any quote and usually the most valuable.

Hosting, domain and administration. Small, real, and recurring. A domain registered in your own name rather than the agency's, renewed on time, with certificates that do not expire on a Saturday.

Availability. Somebody who answers when you want your prices changed, and who still remembers how the site is put together. This is the cost most quotes hide, because it is the one that lasts longest.

Add those up honestly and you do not get four thousand pounds for a small business site. You get a modest setup cost and a small monthly one. That is roughly how we price it, and we would rather you compared the shape of it than the number.

Why the old prices persist

Three reasons, none of them conspiratorial.

Anchoring. Everybody quotes what everybody quotes. An agency that halves its price looks cheap rather than honest, and cheap is a difficult signal in a market where clients cannot assess quality directly.

It is genuinely hard to compare. "A website" is an output, not a scope. One quote includes research, copy, listings work and a year of changes. Another is five templated pages and goodbye. They look like the same product on a page.

Some agencies really do still work the old way, and their costs really are what they say. That is a business model problem rather than dishonesty.

What to do about it

Do not haggle. Ask what the money buys.

Specifically: what happens after launch, who owns the domain, what a change costs in year two, and what evidence you will be given that the thing works. A firm charging a fair price has ready answers. A firm charging an inherited price tends to answer by describing the pages again.

The full list of questions is in what to check in a web design quote, and the market ranges are in how much a website should actually cost.

The uncomfortable part for us

Writing this costs us money. It makes it harder for us to charge more later, and it hands every reader the argument they need to push back on our own quotes.

We would rather have that conversation than the other one. The alternative is a market where the price is defended by the client not knowing, and that only holds until they find out. They are finding out, because they use the same tools at work. We would rather be the firm that said it first than the one that got caught.