A response to How Much Will This Website Cost? (February 2024)
In February 2024 I opened my pricing series with the question that hangs over every proposal. I called it the biggest question of them all, and I argued that answering it openly was the greatest trust building opportunity in a sales process. Most of the time, both sides do the opposite:
“usually both the client and the agency engage in the pricing dance.”
The client hides the budget. The agency tries to maximize the opportunity, or just avoid going underwater. Nobody trusts anybody. My answer was to put the pricing cards on the table up front. I still believe that completely.
The cost centers, then and now
In that video I laid out the factors that drive a website’s price: page count, content density and complexity, visual design requirements, advanced features like e-commerce and CRM integrations, and accessibility. Then I went through each one over the following videos.
Those categories are still a good way to think about a project. What has changed is how much of each one was really about development, and development is the part that has collapsed. AI agents now write and revise custom code under experienced direction. Templates, layouts, integrations, and migration work that used to take weeks of developer time now take a small fraction of it.
So when I walk through the cost centers today, the weight has moved. Page count barely touches the build anymore. Complex content still needs careful planning, but presenting it well no longer needs a pile of plugins or days of custom work. Ambitious design no longer doubles the development budget. Advanced features can be built to fit instead of borrowed and bent. I’ve written a response to each of these, starting with page count.
The result is that the overall price of a well-built site is far less than it used to be, and what’s left in the budget is mostly the thinking: strategy, information design, content, visual design decisions, and careful review.
The factor agents can’t touch
The cost center I spent the most time on in that video wasn’t technical at all. It was the makeup of the client team. On one end, a single decisive contact who has been through a web project before. On the other, a large committee with no final decision maker, slow and contradictory feedback, and a board member who only shows up at milestones. For that second kind of team, I said:
“a project fee might need to be doubled or even tripled to account for the profound liabilities of such a team profile.”
That was true then, and I’d be lying if I said agents fixed it. AI doesn’t make a committee more decisive. It doesn’t settle a disagreement between marketing and development.
What it does change is the cost of indecision. When a revision took days of developer time, every reversal was expensive, and that’s why a difficult team could double a fee. Now a change of direction can often be built and shown within the same conversation. Feedback cycles are shorter, and a reversal costs far less. The people problems remain. Their price tag shrinks.
That said, the human time doesn’t shrink. Meetings, explanations, and reviews with a large team still take hours from experienced people, and that still belongs in an honest estimate.
Still putting the cards on the table
The heart of that video was transparency. Avoid the pricing dance. Explain where the money goes so a client can adjust their requirements or their budget with their eyes open. That hasn’t changed at all.
What has changed is the conversation itself. In 2024, the honest answer often included a trade off: we can do this within budget if you accept some compromise on design, speed, or features. Today we can usually have the custom design, the lean code, and the features, all at a lower price. The pricing conversation has gotten a lot more pleasant.
It also continues after launch. Ongoing support starts at $149 a month, with hosting included, so the total cost of owning the site is just as clear as the cost of building it.
¡Viva la Revolución!