Why Nobody Will Quote You a Price for a Law Firm Website

Ask an agency what a law firm website costs and watch how hard they work not to answer. You will be offered a discovery call, a strategy session, a questionnaire. What you will not be offered is a number.

This is annoying, and it is worth separating the part of it that is evasion from the part that is unavoidable.

The Unavoidable Part

Websites are not a product with a unit. Two firms asking for "a website" can want jobs that differ by a factor of ten.

One has eight pages, current copy, no forms beyond a contact box, and needs a good-looking site that loads fast. Another has two hundred pages of practice area content written over fifteen years, wants all of it reviewed and rewritten rather than moved across, and needs clients to log in and see case status.

Both of those are "a website". A single price covering both is either far too high for the first firm or ruinous for whoever quoted it on the second.

Three things move the number more than anything else: how many pages there are, how much of the existing content needs rewriting rather than migrating, and how much the site has to do beyond publishing. That last one is where portals and intake tooling live, and it is the one that varies most.

The Evasive Part

The rest of it is less defensible.

Some of the silence is because the price depends on what the agency thinks you can pay. A discovery call is partly discovery and partly qualification, and the number arrives shaped by your letterhead.

Some of it is that the real cost is in a recurring line the proposal introduces late. A build price that seems reasonable next to a monthly retainer that quietly doubles the annual figure is a common structure, and it is not made clearer by being explained on a call rather than written down.

What to Ask Instead

Since you are not going to get a price from a website, get these instead, in writing, before you get attached to anyone.

1. What is the total for the first twenty-four months? Build plus every recurring cost. This single question collapses most of the games.
2. Who owns the site if we leave? Ask specifically about the content, the domain, and the platform. Some arrangements are effectively a lease.
3. What happens to the existing content? Reviewed and rewritten, or copied across? These are very different amounts of work and are often quoted as though they were the same.
4. What is explicitly not included? The interesting part of any proposal is the list it does not have.
5. Who writes it? If the answer is that you do, that is fine, as long as everyone knows before launch day rather than during it.

Our Version

We do not put prices on this site either, and it would be dishonest to pretend that is purely principled. It is mostly the first reason above: the range is genuinely wide and a number here would mislead more firms than it helped.

What we do instead is scope it on a call, put the whole figure in writing before anything starts, and not introduce a recurring cost afterwards that was not discussed. What a build includes is written out plainly, which at least lets you compare like with like when the other four proposals arrive.