Why portfolios do not decide it
Broz is a case about exactly this problem: an agency homepage competes with every other agency homepage, so that one spends its entire hero on a single sentence instead of a grid. The grids are interchangeable and everybody knows it, including the agencies making them.
What a portfolio genuinely tells you is range and taste. What it cannot tell you is whether the project ran on time, whether the client was updated, or whether the beautiful site was delivered eleven weeks late with a relationship in ruins.
Which means the useful part of choosing happens in conversation, and the questions below are the ones most agencies are not asked.
Six questions that separate them
**Show me the last three projects, not the best three.** The showreel is a selection. The last three are the product. An agency that hesitates here is telling you something.
**Who will actually work on this?** Ask for names and what each does. Pitch teams and delivery teams being different people is normal in large agencies and worth knowing before, not after.
**What happens when we disagree about the design?** Everyone has a process for agreement. Ask about disagreement — how many rounds, who decides, what happens on round four.
**What do you need from us, and when?** A good agency has an immediate answer with dates in it. A vague one is a project that will later be late because of you, and will be described that way.
**What does this not include?** Copy, photography, translations, integrations. Every over-budget project began with a scope where these went unmentioned.
**What do we own at the end?** Ask before signing, not at handover.
Three answers that should end it
**“We can start Monday.”** For a team with a real pipeline, immediate availability is unusual. It is not always bad, and it always deserves one more question.
**A number without questions.** An agency quoting a website before asking what it has to achieve, what content exists and who signs off is quoting a template. The number will be wrong and the correction will arrive in week five.
**“Yes” to everything.** Ecommerce, an app, a CRM, a booking system, all inside the same quote, with no mention of what gets harder. The right answer to some requests is that they are a different project — what Webflow cannot do is the version of that we publish rather than hide.
How to compare quotes that are not comparable
Ask all of them to price the same explicit scope: this many pages, this content status, these integrations, this launch date. Quotes differ mostly because agencies assumed different things, not because one is greedier.
Then compare what each one excluded. That list is more informative than the total, and it is where the eventual argument lives.
And treat the brief itself as the lever. A brief that answers five things turns three incomparable numbers into three comparable ones, which is worth more than any negotiation.
Questions we get asked
How do I compare web design agency quotes?
Give every agency the same explicit scope — page count, content status, integrations, launch date — because quotes differ mainly through differing assumptions. Then compare the exclusions rather than the totals; that list is where the eventual disagreement lives.
What questions should I ask a web design agency?
Ask for the last three projects rather than the best three, who will actually do the work, what happens when you disagree about design, what they need from you and when, what the quote excludes, and what you own at the end.
What are the warning signs when hiring an agency?
Immediate availability without explanation, a price quoted before any questions about goals or content, and agreement to every request without naming what gets harder. Each is survivable; together they describe a template being sold as a project.