A website quote should include a total, not just a monthly figure, and every line named. Put all three quotes on one 36 month total, then subtract the lines whose floor price is published by somebody other than the company quoting you. What is left is labor, and labor is the only line where three honest quotes can differ much.
Put all three quotes on the same clock
Pick 36 months. Three years is long enough that a setup fee stops hiding, and short enough that you can still picture it.
For each quote, add the money due up front, add the monthly fee times 36, and add anything the quote says changes at renewal. One number per quote. Write all three down before you read another word of any proposal.
That one step kills most of the confusion. A big build fee with a small monthly can land within a few hundred dollars of a small build fee with a big monthly, and you cannot see it until both sit on the same clock. Which shape suits your cash flow is a separate question, and it is answered in paying monthly against paying once.
Subtract the lines with a published floor
Some lines in a website quote have a price set in public. You can look each one up tonight, from your phone, without asking the company anything.
- The certificate. Let’s Encrypt describes itself on its home page as a nonprofit providing free TLS certificates to more than 700M websites, and says it is run by the Internet Security Research Group. That page carries no update date. A separate yearly line for SSL is a charge for something that is given away.
- Hosting, on plain files. Cloudflare’s plans page lists its Free plan at $0 a month, with DNS, a content delivery network, unmetered attack protection, and a Universal SSL Certificate. That page carries no update date. Cloudflare’s own documentation puts numbers on the free hosting tier: 500 builds a month, up to 20,000 files per site, 100 custom domains, and a 25 MiB cap on any single file. That page was last updated July 16, 2026.
- Hosting, checked twice. Netlify’s pricing page lists a Free plan at “$0 forever”, with custom domains, SSL, and a global content delivery network. That page carries no update date.
A five page contractor site is nowhere near any of those limits. So on plain files, at ordinary traffic, the hosting line has a floor of zero, and two companies publish it in their own words.
Take those lines out of each 36 month total.
A floor is not a fair price
Here is the part a price comparison usually skips. Knowing a floor does not tell you what the work is worth, and the quote nearest the floor is not automatically the better buy. It can just mean nobody has planned to do very much.
Three limits on the numbers above, stated plainly.
Free hosting tiers are for plain files. WordPress’s own requirements page asks for PHP 8.3 or greater and a MariaDB or MySQL database, which is a server and a database running all day, so those free plans do not fit it. That page carries no update date. If your quote is for WordPress, hosting is a real line with a real cost, and you should expect to see one, along with the plugin fees underneath it.
Free tiers also have a ceiling. The Cloudflare numbers are that tier’s limits, not a promise about your site. If a build ships thousands of photos, somebody has to check the limits against the real thing rather than assume.
The domain gets no dollar figure here, on purpose. The wholesale price is set by the registry that runs .com, and it moves. In its first quarter results, dated April 23, 2026, Verisign said it will raise the yearly registry fee on every new and renewed .com from $10.26 to $10.97 on November 1, 2026. A number printed today goes stale, and a stale number inside a quote comparison is worse than no number at all. Look it up yourself instead. Cloudflare’s registrar documentation, last updated April 24, 2026, says it applies no markup and that you pay only what the registries and ICANN charge. If that holds, the price shown there sits close to the floor, and it takes two minutes to read.
Then read the renewal price on every quote, never the first year price. A quote that shows only year one is not showing you a 36 month cost.
What is left is labor, and that is the real comparison
Once the floor lines are gone, everything still in the quote is a person doing something. Make each quote name it.
- How many written pages, and who writes them.
- Who builds, who edits, and how many rounds of changes are included.
- What happens in month four, in plain words. If nobody can say, nothing happens in month four.
- Who holds the domain registration, the logins, and the files if you leave.
- What is billed separately: extra pages, ad spend, paid directory fees.
A quote that names deliverables can be set beside another quote that names deliverables. A quote that says “ongoing support” cannot be set beside anything, and there is no arithmetic that fixes that.
If a quote ties you to a term, or makes cancelling cost you the site, that is a legal document, not a price. This is not legal or tax advice. Contract terms are read under your own state’s law, so take the paper to an attorney licensed in your state before signing, and ask your accountant how the spend lands on your books.
If the quote names ongoing search work, what an SEO retainer includes sets out what that line should say in writing. The pricing page lists the three Galloping plans and what each one includes, so the same arithmetic runs on those too.
When not to buy anything yet
If the three totals land within a few hundred dollars of each other over 36 months, stop shopping on price. You are choosing a person at that point, and the number will tell you nothing more.
If a company will not put its lines in writing, you do not have a quote. You have a conversation. One email listing the up front figure, the monthly figure, the term, the renewal price, and the named work is enough. Nobody needs a glossy proposal.
And if your current site says plainly what you do and the phone still rings, a rebuild is not urgent. Ask each company what it would change and why, in writing, before you compare totals at all. A quote with no named problem to fix is a quote for work nobody has justified.
What to do next
- Ask each company for a written quote with four lines: due up front, monthly, term length, renewal price.
- Convert each quote into one 36 month total.
- Subtract the certificate, and hosting if the site is plain files. Price the domain yourself at a registrar that sells at cost.
- Set the three remaining numbers side by side and ask what work each one buys.
- Ask the ownership questions in writing before you sign anything.
Do that and the quotes stop being three sales documents and start being three numbers. If you want to know where you stand before spending anything, the free scan has a person check what ChatGPT and Google say about your business, then email you what to fix first.