01Ownership and exit
Ask these first. If the answers are vague, nothing else matters, because you are renting rather than buying.
- Who owns the code when this is finished, in writing?
- Is the domain registered in my name or yours?
- If I hire someone else next year, what do they receive from you?
- Is there a monthly fee, and does the site stop working if I stop paying it?
02Scope and money
Most disputes are not about quality. They are about two people who meant different things by the same word.
- How many pages, named individually, not just a total?
- Who writes the text, and who supplies the photos?
- What does a change cost after launch, per hour or per change?
- Is hosting, the domain and the SSL certificate in this price or extra?
- What is explicitly NOT included?
03Answers that should worry you
None of these mean the person is dishonest. All of them mean you should get a second quote.
- A guaranteed Google position. Nobody controls that, and offering it says something about everything else they claim.
- A price with no page count attached.
- Refusing to name what happens to your existing URLs when the old site is replaced.
- A large deposit before you have seen anything at all.
- No live sites to show, or only sites that are no longer online.
The ownership question, from the other side
Santorini Hotel needed a public website and a guest app. The tempting answer is to build and bill three times, once per platform. We built one codebase that ships to web, iOS and Android instead, which means one change lands everywhere and the hotel is not paying to maintain three versions of the same booking flow. Ask any developer what happens when you want the same feature on the app and the site. The answer tells you how they charge.
See the build: Santorini HotelQuestions, answered
Is a cheap quote always a bad sign?
No. It usually means a template configured rather than a site built, which is a legitimate product at that price. It is only a problem if you were told it was custom.
Should I pay a deposit?
It is the industry norm and not unreasonable, since the builder carries the risk otherwise. Just know what it buys and what happens to it if you walk away. We took the other side of that trade and ask for nothing up front.
How do I judge quality if I am not technical?
Open three of their live sites on your phone. If they load fast, read well and you can find a phone number in two seconds, that tells you more than any portfolio image.
Where PROOF48 fits
Our answers, in order: you own everything, we redirect every old URL, we write the text if you do not have it, the price is agreed before we build, and if you do not like the result you pay nothing. Every site on our work page is live and you can open it right now.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Building software since 2018. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, which means every opinion here was paid for in builds rather than in theory.