Let me start with a confession. Sometimes that feeling is wrong.
Imagine you commission a handcrafted piece of furniture. It arrives, you look at it, and you think: that’s a few pieces of wood. I could have knocked that up in a weekend. Why does it cost this much?
What you’re not seeing is the joinery. The hours of sanding. The expertise in the hands that shaped it. The ten years of learning what not to do. The craft is invisible. And so the price feels unjustified.
Digital projects have the same problem, but worse. A website or application is an iceberg. What you see is the surface: the screens, the buttons, the layout. What you don’t see is everything underneath: the architecture, the integrations, the security considerations, the performance optimisation, the decisions made and unmade before a single pixel was placed. The cost lives in the invisible part.
That said, and I want to be very clear about this, I’m not here to justify expensive projects, or projects that are unnecessarily expensive. This is not a defence of the industry. The cold hard question is always the same: what value is this delivering to your business?
If the value to your business is R1,000 and the solution costs R10,000 (no matter how well it’s presented, no matter how confidently the salesperson explains it) it is not justified. Full stop.
Work out the value before you ask for prices
The problem is that most businesses getting quotes haven’t worked out the value to their own business before they start asking for prices.
They know they need something. They’ve decided what they think that something is. They get quotes. And now they’re comparing numbers without a reference point: because they never did the cold hard number crunching on what the project is actually worth to them.
That’s when the feeling of being ripped off sets in. Not necessarily because you are being ripped off. But because you have no anchor.
Why you should always get more than one quote
Here’s what to do about the quotes themselves.
Get more than one. Always. Some businesses are more skilled than others. Some are more optimised. Some are more thorough. A variance in price between quotes is normal, just as there’s a variance between an entry-level car and a luxury one. Multiple quotes give you a reference range and take care of the worst of the problem.
But here’s the harder truth: three quotes for “the same project” are rarely actually for the same project. Each agency or developer has made different assumptions about scope, different decisions about technology, different judgments about what the brief actually requires. You’re often not comparing like with like. And you might not have the expertise to know which assumptions are right.
This is where you’re a little at the mercy of how honest the people quoting you are being. Just like a mechanic telling you what needs replacing: if you don’t know engines, you’re trusting them. And a good salesperson will sell you the project regardless of whether it’s right for you. Eventually, that leads to exactly the feeling you were trying to avoid.
The opposite problem: underinvesting
There’s another side to this that almost nobody talks about.
Some businesses aren’t being ripped off. They’re underinvesting. They’re sitting on a digital opportunity that could return ten times the cost. And they’re too scared to spend the money because the quote feels big without any reference to what it could deliver.
Both directions are a problem. Overspending on something with low value. Underspending on something with enormous value. Both come from the same root cause: not having done the thinking about value before looking at cost.
What to do when you’re not sure about a quote
So what do you actually do if you’re sitting with a quote right now and you’re not sure?
Get an expert to look at it with you. Someone who has no relationship with the agency quoting you, no product to sell, no incentive other than giving you an honest read. Someone who can look at what’s being proposed, what it’s going to cost, and tell you whether it makes sense for your situation.
That’s not a complicated service. It doesn’t take long. But it changes the dynamic completely: because suddenly you’re not alone in the room with a quote you don’t fully understand.
The furniture analogy breaks down here, actually. With furniture, you can see what you’re getting. With digital, you often can’t, not until it’s built. Which is exactly when an independent pair of eyes, before you sign anything, is worth the most.
Garth Shoebridge has spent 25 years on both sides of digital project quotes: building things, briefing things, and helping businesses work out whether what they’re being sold is actually what they need. If you’ve got a quote on the table and something feels off, start with a conversation.