A response to Why So Expensive? Why So Cheap? (April 2024)
In April 2024 I told a story about shopping for an electric guitar. A Paul Reed Smith SE Custom sat right next to a Paul Reed Smith Hollowbody II. One was just under $1,000. The other was $7,520. From the outside they looked pretty similar. Mike at Harry’s in Raleigh had to explain the hand-carved mahogany and the high end pickups before the gap made sense.
WordPress pricing, I said, works the same way. Clients see offers under a thousand dollars and offers many times that, and they have no idea why. So I explained the gulf:
“And this accounts for the huge gulf between low end WordPress and higher end custom WordPress development.”
The “this” was programming. Out of the box WordPress with an off the shelf theme is cheap. As soon as you need custom content types and a custom theme to display them, you need developers writing PHP, CSS, and JavaScript. That was the Hollowbody price.
The answer I gave to “why so cheap?”
The more interesting half of that video was the other question. Clients who understood they needed custom work would compare our proposal to other custom shops and wonder why ours was so much lower. My answer was low code:
“This significantly reduces the biggest cost center of custom development”
meaning programmer time. Page builder frameworks let us build dynamic sites without writing all that code by hand. That was true, and it was a real advantage for our clients in 2024.
But it came with a trade off. We avoided the cost of custom code by carrying the weight of a framework that was built to do everything for everyone. The site was more affordable, and also heavier and more dependent on someone else’s product.
The gulf has collapsed
Here is what changed. The biggest cost center of custom development, programmer time, has collapsed. AI agents now write and revise custom PHP, CSS, and JavaScript under experienced direction, quickly. The exact work that created the gulf between cheap and custom WordPress is no longer the expensive part.
That means the guitar analogy breaks down in an interesting way. Imagine a shop that could build the hand-carved Hollowbody for close to the price of the SE. Same wood, same pickups, made for you. That is roughly where custom WordPress development sits now. I explain more of the economics in our approach to pricing.
So we no longer use a page builder to get the price down. We build on our own AI-native theme, with custom code written for each site, and the price still comes in at a fraction of what custom development used to cost. We don’t have to trade custom for affordable, or lean for flexible. We get all of it.
What you are paying for now
If programming is no longer the main cost, what is a website budget for?
Mostly the things that were always the most valuable, and that never got enough of the budget. Discovery and strategy. Planning how the content is organized. Design decisions. Writing and editing. Careful review and testing of everything the agents build. And the experience to direct the work and stand behind it. Those are human jobs, and they are where the money now goes.
That also changes how I would answer both questions today.
Why so expensive? Usually because a project needs real planning, real content work, or a lot of features to think through. Not because someone is hand-writing every line of PHP.
Why so cheap? Because the expensive step really did get cheaper, and we pass that on. A low price is no longer a red flag that something is being skipped. It can simply mean the builder isn’t billing you for work an agent did in minutes.
You still get what you pay for
In that video I mentioned the maxim “you get what you pay for.” I still believe it. A cheap site that skips planning, design, and testing is still a cheap site. The difference is that what you pay for now is judgment, not keystrokes.
And for the record, I settled on the SE.
¡Viva la Revolución!