Freelancer, agency, or fixed-price service?
Three ways to buy a website, what each is actually good at, and the failure mode of each one that nobody mentions during the sales conversation.
Most advice on this compares price. Price is the least interesting difference — all three can produce a good website, and all three can waste your money.
What separates them is what happens when something goes wrong.
Freelancer
Good at: value, directness, and speed. You talk to the person doing the work. No account manager, no relay, no margin funding an office.
The failure mode nobody mentions: availability. One person, several clients, and no cover. When they are ill, overloaded or have taken a bigger contract, your project stops and there is no one else to ask. This is not a character flaw — it is arithmetic.
How to protect yourself: ask what happens if they are unavailable for two weeks. Get the code and the accounts in your name from the start. Pay against milestones you can see, never a large amount upfront.
Best for: a defined project, a reasonable budget, and someone whose recent work you can look at and verify.
Agency
Good at: capacity, continuity, and process. People cover for each other. There is someone to escalate to. On a project with genuine moving parts — integrations, multiple stakeholders, phases — that process is what stops it falling over, and it is worth paying for.
The failure mode nobody mentions: the people who pitch are often not the people who build. This is normal and not sinister, but if you chose the agency because you were impressed by the person in the meeting, find out early whether that person is doing the work.
The second one: small projects get the least attention. A large agency has overheads that a small job cannot cover, so your six-page site is either priced to cover them or handed to whoever is free.
How to protect yourself: ask who specifically will build it. Ask what their smallest recent project was — if yours is far below their normal size, you will feel it.
Best for: large or complex projects, or when you need someone accountable to a board rather than to you.
Fixed-price service
Good at: knowing exactly what you are getting and what it costs before you speak to anyone. No discovery phase, no scope creep, no quote that arrives a week later.
The failure mode nobody mentions: it only works if your project fits the box. A defined service is defined by exclusions, and a supplier under pressure to say yes will stretch the product to fit — which produces a bad version of both the thing you wanted and the thing they sell.
How to protect yourself: ask what is not included, and check the answer is specific. Then ask what happens when you want one of those things. If the answer is vague, the fixed price is a starting price.
Best for: a standard need — a small business website that says what you do, shows proof, gives prices and takes enquiries.
This is what we do, so treat the paragraph above as an argument for our own category, and the exclusions as the thing to test us on.
The question that sorts it
How defined is what you want?
- You can describe it in a paragraph and it resembles other businesses' sites → fixed-price service. You will overpay elsewhere for process you do not need.
- You know what you want but it is substantial or unusual → freelancer or agency, depending on how much risk you want to carry.
- You know the problem but not the product → neither. You want a paid discovery engagement that ends with a scope and an estimate. Buying a build before you know what to build is the most expensive mistake on this page.
Four questions for all three
- What is not included?
- Who specifically does the work?
- Do I own the code, the domain and the accounts from day one?
- What does a change cost after launch?
The answers will separate three suppliers faster than the quotes will. Two quotes that differ by five times are usually for different projects — the job is to find that out before signing, not after.
If yours is the first category, here is what we charge and what it excludes.