This doesn’t happen often with our projects. But it does happen.

When you hire us to build your website, the cost of the project may change from what we initially agreed.

Sounds unfair if you’re a client, right?

We hear you clearly. We too hate changing the price even by a small amount, but occasionally we simply have to do this.

To be honest, most of our projects (more than 90%) go as expected at the same price we quote in the beginning.

But that leaves few of the clients (10% or less) paying more than originally quoted. That doesn’t mean we don’t stay to our words or we’re partial to those clients.

In this post, I will explain why this might happen and how it can be avoided.

What Is The Cost of a Website?

When it comes to pricing, we try our best to be completely transparent.

You will be clear on what you are getting and what the cost will be upfront, with no hidden fees popping up midway.

The pricing depends entirely on what your project requires, the goals you’re looking to achieve and the time it will take.

We Start With Project Discovery

Before you give you a final estimate for your project, we do a detailed project discovery with you, to get as many details from you as possible.

By doing this at the beginning of the project, we are in a better position to provide you with an accurate estimate for your project and avoid any future price increase.

During our discovery process, we’ll ask you about:

• The main reasons for needing a new website
• Who your ideal customers are and what they look for on your website
• How you want customers to feel when browsing your website
• What success looks like to your business
• The specifics features you want
• Any design preferences
• and much more…

The reason we spend so much time asking these questions at the beginning of the project is that every answer we get from you changes the scope of work, and obviously decides the project cost.

The more information we gather at this very early stage, the more accurate our proposal will be.

I’ve broken down the main reasons why this might happen below.

1) Extra Features or Services Needed

One of the main and obvious reasons for an increase in a project cost is adding extra features or services to our original proposal.

We understand that things may change slightly during the project and you may need to make some tweaks as we go along, which is why we try to be as flexible as possible as we can.

However, some things need to be billed.

For example, we start the project where the scope of work is to build a website to inform and educate your prospects about your services and get in touch with you.

And during the build, you decide you also want to sell products with a shopping cart. Now you see the project scope totally changed from what was originally decided. So that’s is something that needs to be billed separately as it would take more time and resources to implement.

Or suppose you want to add in a booking calendar or integrate a CRM with your website. In those cases, we may need some extra tools and resources (obviously more time) to build and configure these, that’s where the price may increase.

The same thing also applies to:

• Additional pages to design
• Setup of landing pages
• Extra support outside the project scope (Coaching for other marketing services)
• Email marketing integration
• CRM integration
• Any third party tool to setup with website

Basically, if it’s something that wasn’t agreed upon at the start of the project and isn’t covered in our proposal, it could increase the price for your website.

2) Changing The Project Schedule

At the start of the project, we give you a good indication of the project duration. Most of our website projects take between 6-10 weeks, depending on what’s required.

Once we start on your project, we will work with you to set up a launch date for your new website.

This date will then be added to our calendar and our other projects will be scheduled around this so your website has our utmost attention during this timeline and ensure everything goes smoothly from start to launch.

If we do agree on a launch date and you decide to change it, it may increase the final project price.

For example, you may want to bring the launch date forward to make it live sooner or you want to postpone it to a later date (by more than two weeks) than we initially agreed.

This usually means we’ll have to rearrange our calendar and block out additional time to work on your website. If this is the case, your project price is likely to increase.

3) You Want Design / Layout Changes After Approval

At every stage of our web design process, we communicate with you consistently and take your feedback to see if you need any modification in terms of design or layouts.

Based on your feedback, we make changes and once you’re happy with it and you approve one stage of the build, we move onto the next one.

Every stage is a confirmation of the previous stage.

For example, if you hire a builder to build your new home, you can’t ask them to change the structure of the first floor after they’ve done the roof.

So if you change your mind on the design AFTER they’ve been earlier approved by you and we’ve moved further on the website, we may have to charge extra depending on how much needs to be rebuilt in order to accommodate the changes.

This doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to make changes. There might be some tweaks you’ll want to make and if they’re relatively small, we will be able to make these without additional costs.

However, we do always recommend that you make sure you’re happy with the one phase of the project before we move into the next phase to avoid any unnecessary scope creeps or costs.

How To Make Sure The Price Stays The Same

If you want to ensure the project doesn’t go over the initial estimate we provide, please take the time to plan the project as clearly as possible before proceeding with us.

You can also download our guide 5 Steps To A Winning Website Project​ to set yourself on the path to a perfect website and where you can learn the secrets to a successful website project.

We have created this guide to ensure you are fully aware of what you might need to consider before we have our initial consultation.