You're right to compare quotes. But the build price is only part of what a website costs you, and the gap usually shows up in year one rather than on day one. Here's exactly where.
Not a criticism. Just what has to give at that price.
To be straight with you, my own standard listing sits at around $550 for a WordPress build, so I'm not going to pretend work at that price doesn't exist. It does, and I sell it. It's just a different product to what I've quoted you here, and at $500 for your full brief, three things normally get cut.
Pirated copies of paid plugins with the licence stripped out. They work on day one, but they can never receive a security update, and a good number ship with injected code the buyer never sees. This is the single most common reason WordPress sites get hacked.
The same template sold to thousands of others, with your logo dropped in. Fine until a competitor buys the same one. It also carries page builder bloat, which is what makes most WordPress sites slow.
Plugins and themes need updating every month or the site drifts out of date and becomes a target. At $500 that upkeep isn't included, so it either becomes a monthly bill or it quietly stops happening.
A builder-based WordPress site is usually slow out of the box. Fixing that afterwards with caching and optimisation plugins is a separate job, and it never gets it back to where a modern build starts.
"Are all plugin licences bought in my name, and will you show me the receipts?"
You'll know very quickly what you're buying. It's a fair question and any honest developer will answer it without hesitation.Typical figures, not worst case.
The $400 difference on day one is paid back inside about six months, and after that the gap only widens. Year two on a Next.js site is close to nothing beyond hosting.
It isn't a preference. The costs genuinely aren't there.
Pages are pre-built and served ready. There's no plugin stack to slow down, so speed doesn't need buying later.
No admin login sat on a public URL, no third party plugins running on the server. The usual ways in simply don't exist.
Nothing to patch every month. That $80 a month line disappears from the running cost entirely.
Admin panel for text, images, blog posts and case studies. Day to day it feels like WordPress, without what sits underneath it.
You've been a client before, so this isn't my list price.
Same six pages. Every plugin licensed and bought in your name, no nulled anything.
Custom build, no template, no monthly upkeep. $150 more than Option A.
That's a genuine returning client price and as low as I can go while still building it properly. I'd rather be straight with you about that than quote $500 and cut the things above without telling you.
If you'd rather go elsewhere on price, no hard feelings at all. Just ask them the licence question first.
Back to the proposal