If you have asked a few companies what a new website costs, you have probably received answers that are all over the place. One person says $1,500, another says $7,500, and another says $25,000. At first glance, they may all sound like they are selling the same thing: a website. They usually are not.
Website pricing depends on who is doing the work, how much planning goes into the project, how custom the design is, whether the content is written for you, what the website needs to connect to, how much SEO work is included, and what happens after launch.
For a typical small or mid-sized service business, we usually see professional website projects land somewhere between $4,500 and $15,000, with around $7,500 being a common project size. That does not mean every website should cost $7,500. A brand-new business may be better off building something themselves for $30 a month, while a larger company with multiple locations, custom development, or hundreds of pages may easily spend $20,000 or much more.
The goal of this guide is to explain what you are actually paying for, why website quotes can be so different, what the different price ranges normally include, and what questions you should ask before hiring someone.
If you want a number specific to your own project instead of a range, our website cost estimator can give you a starting point in a couple of minutes.
Why Website Prices Vary So Much
The easiest way to understand website pricing is to stop thinking about it as buying a certain number of pages. You are really buying a process.
Two companies can both quote a “10-page WordPress website,” but the work behind those ten pages can be completely different. One company may ask you to provide the content, install a pre-made theme, swap in your logo and colours, add your text, and launch it.
Another company may research your competitors, research how customers search for your services, plan the page structure, write the content, design the site around your business, build custom layouts, set up forms and tracking, handle SEO, migrate old URLs, connect analytics, test the site, and support the launch.
Both can honestly say they built you a 10-page website. The amount of work behind those ten pages is completely different.
After years of working on websites for trades, professional services, clinics, industrial companies, multi-location businesses, ecommerce businesses, nonprofits, municipalities, and other organizations, one thing becomes pretty clear: the price usually has much more to do with the process behind the website than the number of pages on it.
A five-page website can be a $500 DIY project, or it can be a $10,000 professional project. Both can be completely legitimate. The real question is what is happening behind those five pages and how much strategy, design, content, development, SEO, and testing went into them.
What Does a Website Cost Today?
The website market has changed a lot over the last few years. Your choices used to be fairly simple: build it yourself, hire a freelancer, or hire an agency.
Now AI website builders have added another option. Tools like Wix, Squarespace, Hostinger, and others can generate layouts, write draft content, suggest images, create forms, and help you get a basic website online much faster than before.
That has made the low end of the website market both cheaper and more capable. It has also made it harder for business owners to understand what they are paying for when one company charges $50 per month and another charges $10,000 for what appears to be the same thing.
The important thing is not whether one option is good and another is bad. It is understanding what each level is designed to do and whether it matches what your business actually needs.
$20 to $100 Per Month: DIY and AI Website Builders
This is the cheapest way to get a website online today, and for some businesses it is absolutely the right choice.
Modern AI website builders can help you create page layouts, starter content, contact forms, basic service pages, images, colours, fonts, and mobile layouts very quickly. If you are starting a side business, testing an idea, launching a very small company, or simply need somewhere online to send people, this can be a great option.
I would not tell every new business owner that they need to spend $7,500 or $10,000 on a website. If the business is still proving whether people actually want the service, that money may be much more valuable somewhere else.
The tradeoff is that the website builder gives you production tools, but it does not automatically give you strategy. You still need to decide what pages should exist, which services deserve their own pages, what customers search for, how the navigation should work, what customers need to know before calling, how leads should be tracked, what locations should be targeted, and whether the content is actually useful.
Take a Calgary HVAC company as an example. An AI builder might reasonably create a Home page, About page, Services page, and Contact page. Visually, that may look perfectly professional.
From an SEO and lead-generation standpoint, though, we may discover that people are separately searching for furnace repair, furnace installation, air conditioning repair, air conditioning installation, heat pumps, garage heaters, commercial HVAC, emergency HVAC, financing, and specific service areas. Those may all deserve separate pages because customers search for them independently.
The AI can help build those pages once someone knows they should exist. Knowing why they should exist in the first place is where strategy and experience come in.
AI builders are a strong option when the website is simple, the budget is small, you need something online quickly, organic search is not a major lead source, and you are comfortable managing the site yourself. They become less attractive when SEO matters, you serve multiple locations, you already have rankings to protect, you need custom integrations, the website plays a major role in sales, or you do not want to manage the technical side yourself.
$1,000 to $3,000: Template Websites and Freelancer Builds
This is probably the price range where I see the biggest variation in quality. There are some very good freelancers building websites in this range, especially when the project is straightforward and their overhead is low.
There are also a lot of websites at this level that are assembled very quickly using purchased themes, demo content, and whatever functionality happened to come bundled with the template.
One thing I have seen repeatedly over the years is the use of large WordPress themes purchased from marketplaces such as ThemeForest or Envato. Themes like Avada became popular because they could theoretically do almost anything. They came packed with sliders, galleries, portfolios, animation systems, page layouts, shortcodes, headers, footers, ecommerce options, and many other features.
That sounds great when you are buying the theme. The problem is that your local plumbing company may now be loading code for features it will never use.
This is what people mean when they talk about website bloat. The site can end up carrying a large amount of CSS, JavaScript, fonts, plugins, shortcodes, database entries, and theme functionality simply because the theme was designed to work for thousands of completely different types of websites.
I have worked on websites where a business only needed a straightforward service site, yet the underlying theme was capable of building a hotel, restaurant, online store, magazine, portfolio, and corporate website all at once. You end up maintaining and optimizing a lot of machinery the actual business never needed.
That can affect page speed, Core Web Vitals, ease of maintenance, plugin compatibility, mobile performance, and how difficult it is for another developer to work on the site later.
This does not mean every ThemeForest website is bad, and it does not mean Avada cannot be used well. A knowledgeable developer can absolutely build a good site with it. The issue is that the low-cost end of the market often combines these very large themes with a fast build process, which means nobody spends much time removing unnecessary features or optimizing what gets loaded.
At the $1,000 to $3,000 level, I would specifically ask what theme or builder is being used and why they chose it. If the answer is simply, “It is the theme we use for everyone,” I would want to understand what that means for speed, flexibility, and future maintenance.
$4,500 to $10,000: Professional Service Business Websites
This is where many established service businesses tend to land. At this level, the site should normally be more than a visual redesign.
There should be a planning process. Someone should be thinking about what services generate the most revenue, who your ideal customers are, how people search for those services, what competitors are ranking for, what your current website already has value in, what pages need to stay, what pages need to be added, what visitors need to see before contacting you, how leads should be tracked, and how the website should grow later.
A strong project in this range often includes competitor research, keyword research, sitemap planning, content strategy, website copy, custom or semi-custom design, mobile-first development, conversion planning, forms and integrations, analytics, Google Search Console, schema, technical SEO setup, redirect planning, performance work, quality assurance, and launch support.
This is also where the technology underneath the website usually starts getting better. You will still see purchased themes occasionally, but less often. More commonly, we see WordPress websites built with tools like Elementor or other modern builders that give designers and developers more control.
Elementor can be a very good tool when it is used properly. It gives developers flexibility, has a strong ecosystem, and makes it possible to build custom layouts while still giving clients a manageable WordPress backend.
You will also still run into older page builders such as Divi and WPBakery, especially on sites that were built several years ago. They can absolutely build functioning websites, but I generally would not recommend starting a new project with them today.
In my experience, they are much harder to optimize well for speed, and older implementations often leave behind extra markup, shortcodes, CSS, and JavaScript. That becomes especially noticeable when you are trying to improve Core Web Vitals or clean up a site that has had several different developers work on it over the years.
That does not mean Elementor is automatically fast. You can build a terrible Elementor site with oversized images, 50 plugins, six font families, and animations everywhere. The tool matters, but how the tool is used matters more.
At this price level, I would expect the provider to be able to explain why they chose their WordPress stack, how they approach performance, and what happens if another developer needs to take over later.
Design Can Change the Price More Than People Realize
Design is one of the biggest factors in website cost, and it is often misunderstood. Not every business needs a heavily designed website.
A local service company may care much more about having a clean, professional site that loads quickly, ranks well, explains its services clearly, and generates phone calls than it does about having every section custom illustrated. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, for many businesses, that is exactly what I recommend.
A website can use a clean design system with consistent headers, service layouts, calls to action, testimonials, forms, cards, and content sections. Once that system is created, additional pages can be built efficiently because the design patterns already exist. That keeps the project cost down while still giving the business a professional website.
Now compare that with a website where every major page has a different design treatment. You may have custom illustrations, custom icons, advanced animations, interactive elements, custom photography, unusual transitions, highly art-directed layouts, or several rounds of design revisions.
All of that takes time. A designer may spend several hours working through one section that could have been built in thirty minutes using an established layout. Multiply that across a homepage and ten or twenty internal pages and the design budget changes quickly.
That does not mean the more expensive design will automatically generate more leads. Sometimes more design is important for brand positioning, trust, or perceived quality. Other times it is simply something the business values and is willing to pay for.
The important thing is understanding that design detail costs money because design takes time.
A business saying, “I want a clean, professional website that ranks, works properly, and generates leads,” may need much less design time than a business saying, “We want people to land on this site and feel like they have never seen anything else like it.”
Neither goal is wrong. They are simply different projects with different budgets.
$10,000 to $25,000+: Larger and More Complex Websites
Once you move beyond a typical service business website, the price often rises because the project becomes more complicated rather than because the homepage suddenly looks twice as good.
A larger project may include dozens or hundreds of pages, multiple locations, custom functionality, advanced forms, CRM integrations, directories, ecommerce, memberships, portals, multilingual content, large content migrations, custom databases, API integrations, accessibility requirements, legal or compliance requirements, more stakeholders, more testing, and more project management.
There may also be several people involved in approving the website. Marketing may review the messaging, operations may review service information, HR may review careers content, legal may need to approve certain pages, and IT may need to approve integrations and hosting. All of that coordination takes time.
There is also more risk. If a five-page startup website launches with a broken URL, the impact may be small. If a 500-page site loses years of organic traffic because hundreds of URLs were changed without proper redirects, the cost of that mistake can dwarf the cost of the web project itself.
That risk and responsibility are part of what you are paying for on larger projects.
Where Does the Money Actually Go?
This is one of the most important things to understand when comparing website prices.
If one company quotes $2,500 and another quotes $7,500, you may reasonably wonder what the extra $5,000 is actually buying. Is the expensive company buying better plugins? Do they have a premium WordPress license the other company does not? Is their hosting dramatically better?
Usually, no.
For most professional website projects, software is a relatively small part of the overall cost. Plugins, hosting, stock photos, development tools, SEO software, backups, security tools, and other software all have real costs, but those expenses usually are not what turns a $2,500 website into a $7,500 website.
The biggest cost is normally people, time, expertise, process, and responsibility.
Planning and Strategy
A lower-cost project may begin with something like, “Send us your logo, your content, and three websites you like.” Then the designer starts building.
A more involved project may start with conversations about your customers, services, competitors, current rankings, service areas, sales process, goals, and what the website is actually supposed to accomplish. Someone may spend hours researching the market before a single design is created.
That planning time costs money, but it can prevent expensive mistakes later. Discovering during planning that three of your services have meaningful search demand is much better than discovering six months after launch that all three were buried together on one generic Services page.
Research
Research is another part of a website project that is almost invisible when you look at the finished product. You do not see the keyword spreadsheet, the competitor review, the Google Analytics research, or someone checking which pages already have rankings and backlinks that need to be protected.
That work can still influence nearly every decision that follows.
Research may determine what pages get built, what those pages are called, how services are grouped, which cities get location pages, what questions are answered, what the navigation looks like, what content should stay, what should be removed, and where calls to action appear.
It does not necessarily make the homepage prettier. It makes the website more intentional.
Content
Content is another major cost that can disappear when you compare proposals.
There is a big difference between “Client provides all copy” and “We research, plan, write, edit, optimize, and publish the copy.” If you are providing all the content yourself, you are doing a meaningful part of the project.
For a 15-page website, professional content work can include hours of research, writing, editing, SEO optimization, revisions, and formatting.
AI has made this faster, and we use AI in our own process. But AI does not remove the need to understand the business, check the facts, make the writing sound natural, and make sure each page has a reason to exist.
You can generate 15 pages of words very quickly today. Generating 15 pages that accurately explain the business, target useful searches, answer real customer questions, and do not sound like every competitor still takes work.
Design
Design can consume very different amounts of time depending on what you want. A clean, conversion-focused service website may establish a strong design system and reuse it efficiently throughout the site.
A highly custom brand-driven website may need much more design time for individual sections, illustrations, animations, graphics, transitions, custom photography, and page-specific layouts.
The more design detail you want, the more time someone has to spend creating it. That time has a cost.
Development
Development is where everything becomes a working website. Simple sites may rely on established components and relatively straightforward builds, while more complex projects may involve custom WordPress development, advanced forms, booking systems, CRM integrations, directories, conditional content, APIs, custom post types, ecommerce, memberships, location systems, accessibility work, and advanced tracking.
Every additional layer creates more development and testing time.
Even requests that sound simple can take time once they need to work properly across desktop, tablet, mobile, different browsers, and different types of content.
SEO
SEO can be another major difference between two projects that look almost identical visually.
Someone may spend time on keyword research, URL structure, title tags, headings, internal links, schema, image optimization, indexing, sitemaps, canonical URLs, redirects, Google Search Console, and local SEO signals.
If the site already ranks, migration work becomes especially important. A company may have spent years building rankings and backlinks to existing URLs, and someone needs to understand what those URLs are worth before changing them.
You are partly paying for the time required to recognize those risks and handle them correctly.
Testing and Quality Control
Larger budgets normally give the team more room to test properly. That may include checking mobile layouts, tablets, browsers, forms, email notifications, buttons, links, redirects, analytics, conversion tracking, page speed, broken pages, metadata, images, and spelling.
There is nothing exciting about spending an hour testing forms. There is also nothing exciting about discovering two months after launch that your lead form has not been sending emails.
Quality assurance is not flashy, but it matters.
Project Management
Someone also has to keep the entire project organized. That includes scheduling, collecting content, organizing feedback, managing revisions, coordinating designers and developers, preparing pages for approval, tracking timelines, and getting the site launched.
On a five-page site with one person approving everything, this may be simple. On a large site with several departments involved, project management can become a significant part of the cost.
Experience
Experience is harder to put into a proposal because an experienced person may actually spend less time solving a problem.
An experienced developer may solve something in thirty minutes that takes a newer developer four hours. Someone with years of strategy and SEO experience may quickly recognize that a URL should not change, a service needs its own page, a form needs conversion tracking, a plugin is likely to create problems, or a design is being overcomplicated.
Those decisions may only take a few minutes. The value comes from the years it took to know which decision to make.
Responsibility
This is probably the least discussed part of professional website pricing.
When you pay more for expertise, you should normally expect the provider to take more responsibility for the outcome. You are not simply saying, “Build what I tell you to build.” You are paying someone to tell you when they think you are making a mistake.
If you want to remove a page that generates 30% of your organic traffic, someone should catch it. If the sitemap makes no sense for search, someone should tell you. If the design looks great but makes the phone number hard to find on mobile, someone should push back.
At a certain point, you are not paying someone only to execute instructions. You are paying them to help make good decisions.
Are Expensive Plugins and Themes What You Are Paying For?
Usually not.
The difference between a free plugin and a $200 premium plugin is not what makes one website cost $3,000 and another cost $10,000.
Professional agencies do pay for a large number of tools. We pay for hosting infrastructure, WordPress tools, SEO software, analytics tools, security, backups, development tools, project management software, and other systems required to do the work.
Those costs are part of operating a professional business, but on an individual website project, the largest cost is still normally the people.
Designers need to be paid. Developers need to be paid. Writers and SEO specialists need to be paid. Someone needs to manage the project. The more time those people spend researching, designing, building, testing, and improving the website, the more the project costs.
Outsourcing Is Not the Problem. Lack of Ownership Is.
You will sometimes hear people say you should avoid any web company that outsources work. I do not think that is very useful advice.
The web industry is global. There are excellent designers, developers, SEO specialists, and other professionals working all over the world, and where somebody physically sits does not tell you whether they are good at their job. Our own team works across borders.
The more important question is who owns the outcome and who actually understands the work.
Some agencies have local sales and account management with distributed production teams, and they operate very well. The processes are clear, the people know their roles, and the person responsible for the client can explain what is happening.
Other companies are basically a sales layer. The person you speak with knows how to sell the service but has very little understanding of websites, SEO, hosting, or advertising. Every technical question disappears somewhere else, and nobody seems clearly responsible when something goes wrong.
That is what I would be cautious about.
Ask who is responsible for strategy, design, development, content, SEO, quality control, launch, and support. Those people do not need to sit in the same office, city, or country, but they do need to function as a team.
Someone you have access to should also be capable of explaining the decisions being made. If you ask why a page exists, why a platform was chosen, how redirects will work, what keyword is being targeted, or how leads are tracked, you should be able to get a useful answer without feeling like you are playing telephone through several companies.
A $5,000 Website Is Not Automatically Better Than a $2,000 Website
Higher price does not automatically mean higher quality.
There are weak agencies charging premium rates. There are excellent freelancers charging less than they probably should. There are large agencies with beautiful proposals and average execution, and there are small teams doing very strong strategic work.
Price alone does not tell you whether the provider is good. What you can judge is whether they understand the work.
Ask them why the website is structured the way it is. Ask what they found in the keyword research. Ask what they would keep from your current site, which pages they think matter most, what your competitors are doing better, how redirects are handled, how leads are tracked, and what happens after launch.
If the answers are clear and specific, that is a good sign. If every answer is vague, delayed, or passed to someone else, pay attention.
AI Has Changed the Market, but It Has Not Removed the Need for Experience
AI has changed website production significantly. It can help with research, content drafts, code, troubleshooting, ideas, layouts, documentation, and repetitive development tasks.
A good web team should be able to use those tools to work faster than it did five years ago. We use AI ourselves.
Where people sometimes get confused is assuming that because production has become faster, the expertise around it no longer has value.
An experienced web team has seen websites rank and fail to rank. We have seen redesigns improve businesses and redesigns destroy organic traffic. We have seen plugins break forms, page builders become obsolete, hosting environments create performance problems, and websites become almost impossible to maintain because years of shortcuts were stacked on top of each other.
We have also seen beautiful websites that generated almost no business and fairly simple websites that produced leads consistently for years. Those experiences change how you make decisions.
AI can tell a developer how to create a redirect, but experience helps you recognize that the redirect needs to exist before the old page disappears. AI can write a service page, but experience helps you decide that the service deserves its own page because customers search for it independently. AI can suggest a nice layout, but experience helps you recognize when that layout is burying the phone number someone needs when their furnace stops working at 10:00 at night.
The value is increasingly not just who can build the page. It is who knows what should be built and can explain why.
Template Website vs Custom Website
This is another major reason quotes vary.
A template website starts with something that already exists. The provider changes the colours, fonts, photos, content, logo, and perhaps some of the layouts.
This can be fast and affordable, and for some businesses it is completely fine.
A custom website starts with your business, your content, your audience, and your goals. The layouts are then designed around those needs.
Neither option is automatically better. The key is knowing what you are paying for.
If the provider is using a template, there is nothing wrong with asking them to say so. The problem is paying custom design prices for something that is essentially a purchased theme with your branding added.
What Should You Ask Before Hiring a Web Design Company?
You can learn a lot by asking a few direct questions before signing anything. You do not need to become a web developer yourself. You simply want to know that the people you are hiring understand the work and can explain what you are buying.
Who Is Actually Working on My Website?
Ask who handles strategy, design, development, content, SEO, and launch. You do not need a separate person for every part of the project, but you should understand who is responsible.
Who Writes the Content?
Find out whether content is included and who actually creates it. Is it written by an SEO specialist, a copywriter, the designer, AI with human review, an outside contractor, or you?
There is a big difference between using AI as part of a professional writing process and automatically generating twenty pages that nobody really reviews.
Is the Website Custom or Based on a Theme?
Ask directly. There is nothing wrong with a template if that is what you want, but there is something wrong with paying custom prices without knowing the difference.
What WordPress Builder or Platform Are You Using?
If the site is being built on WordPress, ask what they are building it with. The provider should be able to explain why they use that setup and what it means for speed, maintenance, editing, flexibility, and future development.
How Are You Handling SEO?
Ask whether the project includes keyword research, page planning, metadata, internal linking, redirects, schema, Search Console, and analytics. If you already rank, ask specifically how that value will be protected.
What Happens After Launch?
Find out who handles hosting, updates, backups, security, broken forms, plugin issues, content changes, new pages, and support.
You do not have to buy all of those services from the same provider, but you should know who is responsible.
Do I Own the Website?
Ask who owns the domain, website, content, Google accounts, and other assets. Ask whether you can move the website and whether anything stops working if you leave.
A website is a business asset. You should understand what you actually own.
Red Flags When Comparing Website Quotes
Price alone does not tell you whether a provider is good or bad, but there are still some things I would be careful about.
They Cannot Explain Their Process
A good provider should be able to explain how they plan, design, build, test, and launch websites. You do not need to understand every technical detail, but they should.
The Proposal Is Extremely Vague
If the whole scope says something like “Custom 10-page website – $8,000,” ask what custom actually means.
You should have a reasonable idea of what you are getting.
They Guarantee Google Rankings
Nobody controls Google. A company can improve your website and SEO, but they cannot honestly guarantee a specific organic ranking.
You Do Not Own the Website
Be careful with platforms or contracts where the website disappears if you stop paying. That business model can be legitimate, but it should be very clear before you sign.
The Price Seems Too Good to Be True
Someone offering a fully custom website, SEO, unlimited revisions, content writing, hosting, maintenance, and support for $500 probably has a different definition of those services than you do.
Cheap is not automatically bad, and expensive is not automatically good. But the math still has to make sense.
Nobody Can Answer Technical Questions
The salesperson does not have to be the developer, but somebody involved with your account should be able to answer basic questions about WordPress, hosting, SEO, redirects, analytics, tracking, forms, and security.
If every question has to be passed through multiple people before you get a useful answer, that may be what the entire relationship looks like.
Freelancer vs Agency
Neither is automatically better.
A good freelancer can be an excellent fit for a smaller project. They often have lower overhead and can provide very direct service.
The tradeoff is that one person may be responsible for sales, design, development, content, SEO, and support. No one is equally strong at everything.
An agency normally costs more because several skill sets may be involved. The tradeoff is that you can have people focusing on strategy, design, development, SEO, content, and support.
The question is not simply freelancer versus agency. It is whether the people you are hiring actually have the skills your project needs.
How Much Should a Small Business Spend on a Website?
For an established service business, I would look at the website as a business asset rather than something that should simply be purchased as cheaply as possible.
If a $7,500 website lasts five years, that works out to about $125 per month before hosting and ongoing work. If the website helps generate even a few additional customers each year, the cost can become relatively small compared with the value it provides.
That does not mean everyone should spend $7,500.
The right budget depends on your business size, average customer value, competition, how important search is, how much business the website generates, what the current website is costing you, how long you expect to use the new site, how much custom design you want, and how complicated the project is.
A business doing $100,000 per year does not necessarily need the same website as a business doing $20 million. The website budget should make sense for the business.
What Does YEG Digital Charge?
Most of our custom website projects fall between $4,500 and $15,000, with around $7,500 being a common project for an established local service business.
Projects can cost more when they include many pages, multiple locations, ecommerce, custom development, large content migrations, complex integrations, more extensive design, or more complicated functionality.
We quote the project before the work begins so you know what it is expected to cost before saying yes. Hosting and ongoing website support are separate monthly services.
How to Compare Website Quotes Properly
Once you understand the different price levels, I would not start by asking which proposal is cheaper. Put the proposals beside each other and look at what is actually included.
Compare who plans the website, who does keyword research, who writes the content, how much design is included, what theme or builder is being used, how performance is handled, who develops the site, how analytics and tracking are set up, how existing SEO is protected, whether redirects are included, what testing happens before launch, what happens after launch, who owns the website, and how easy it will be to move later.
Then ask questions.
A good web company should not be annoyed that you want to understand what you are buying. They should be able to explain it.
The goal is not to find the company with the longest list of deliverables. It is to make sure the price matches the level of strategy, design, technology, expertise, and support your business actually needs.
A $2,500 website can be the right purchase. A $15,000 website can also be the right purchase.
The expensive mistake is paying $15,000 for something that was really a $2,500 website with a better sales process.
The Biggest Thing to Remember
A website quote is not just a price for pages. You are paying for some combination of time, expertise, process, design, technology, and responsibility.
The software matters. The platform matters. The plugins matter. AI matters. But those things alone do not explain why one website costs $2,000 and another costs $10,000.
The biggest difference is usually what people are doing behind the scenes, how experienced they are, and how much responsibility they are taking for getting it right.
When comparing companies, do not only ask, “How much does the website cost?”
Ask:
Who is spending time on my website, what are they spending that time doing, and why does that work matter?
A good provider should be able to answer that clearly, and that answer will usually tell you much more than the price at the bottom of the proposal.
