How to read a website quote, and the four questions almost nobody asks

A website quote is one of the few documents people sign without reading to the end, because everyone jumps straight to the number at the bottom. And the number at the bottom is the least informative thing on the page.

I have spent the last few weeks going through real small-business websites, a lot of them, while preparing prospecting batches. The pattern that repeats is not that the site looks dated. It is that the business does not own its own website and does not know it.

Here is what a quote should break down, the four questions almost nobody asks, and why three of them are answered in Spanish law. I am not a lawyer: what follows are the rules cited by article so you can read them yourself.

What should be itemised

A useful quote separates five things, and if they arrive as a single "web design" line, they have not been thought through:

• What gets built: number of pages, languages, and what works beyond the contact form.
• Who supplies what: copy, photos, logo. Half the delays on any project hide here.
• What happens with the domain and hosting: in whose name, who pays the renewal, and what happens if you stop working with whoever built it.
• What maintenance includes, with what it excludes written next to it.
• Timeline and payment terms, with a date, not with "as soon as you send the content".

A total price without that breakdown cannot be compared to anything. Two quotes of 1,200 euros can be completely different objects.

The four questions

1. Whose name is the domain registered in?

This is the cheapest question to ask and the most expensive one to discover late.

If the registrant of the domain is your provider rather than you, getting it back is not flipping a setting in a control panel. For a .es domain it is a formal procedure called a domain transmission, and according to the registry itself, Dominios.es (Red.es), it is started by the registrar agent, the holder or the administrative contact. If you are none of the three, you depend on someone else starting it.

Ask for it plainly: the domain holder should be your name or your company name, with your tax number, from day one.

2. Where does it say in writing that the code is mine?

Here is the part that surprises almost everyone: commissioning a website and paying for it does not automatically transfer the exploitation rights to you.

Spanish copyright law makes that transfer automatic in one specific case only, the salaried employee. Article 97.4 states that when a salaried employee creates a computer program in the exercise of their duties or following their employer's instructions, the exploitation rights belong to the employer. An agency or a freelancer invoicing you is not your salaried employee, so that automatic rule does not apply.

And article 45 is one line long: "Every assignment must be formalised in writing".

Be clear about what this means and what it does not. It does not mean you are left with nothing: article 43.2 says that if the modes of exploitation are not expressed, the assignment is limited to whatever necessarily follows from the contract and is indispensable to fulfil its purpose. So you hold an implied, narrow licence to use your site. What you do not hold, unless it is written down, is the ownership to rebuild it, move it or hand it to someone else.

3. For how long, and for which uses?

The same article 43 carries a trap almost nobody knows about. Paragraph 2, literally: "The absence of any mention of time limits the transfer to five years", and the absence of a territorial scope limits it to the country where the assignment takes place.

Translated: a contract saying "the client acquires the rights" without saying for how long is giving them to you for five years. And paragraph 1 limits the assignment to the modes of exploitation expressly provided for, so if only "publication on the internet" is named, using it for anything else is already arguable.

The wording you want to see is an exclusive assignment, for all modes of exploitation, for the maximum legal term and for all territories.

4. What does "maintenance" include, and what does it not?

It is the most elastic word in the industry. Backups and security updates are not the same as content changes, and neither is the same as search rankings.

Ask for the list of what is not included. It is shorter to write and far more revealing. If you want the real yearly numbers of keeping a site alive, they are broken down in how much it costs to maintain a website.

Three ways to not own your website

I have seen all three this month, in businesses that work well and make money.

The borrowed domain. A garage with years of reviews whose website lives on a free subdomain of a page builder. The site exists and is not bad. But the address is not theirs, so neither is the reputation that URL accumulates.

The rented booking. A hair salon with more than two hundred reviews whose entire calendar lives on a third-party booking platform. It works very well. And the day they want to leave, every client's history stays behind.

The unmaintained WordPress. A beauty centre with over seven hundred reviews carrying two hidden links to a French pharmacy injected inside its own menu, invisible to visitors and perfectly readable by Google. Nobody had put them there on purpose.

None of the three is a design problem. All three are ownership problems, and all three are decided in the quote, not afterwards.

So what should it cost?

An installer told me recently that he had been quoted 160 euros plus VAT for a website. I am not going to say whether that is expensive or cheap, because without the breakdown the figure means nothing. The useful questions are what sits inside those 160 euros, whose name the domain ends up in, and what he takes with him if he ever leaves.

So you can get your bearings before talking to anyone, I have built a quote estimator on the site: you tick what you need and it gives you a range with the line items broken out, not a single loose number. If you want the long price context by tier, it is in how much a website costs in Spain, and the technology decision is in WordPress or a custom website.

My prices are published on the site and the quote is closed before work starts. And the four questions above apply to me too: ask them.

Sources

• BOE, Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996, consolidated text of the Spanish Intellectual Property Law, articles 43 and 45, consolidated text, checked September 2026 [T1]
• BOE, Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996, article 97.4, ownership of rights over computer programs created by a salaried employee, consolidated text [T1]
• Dominios.es (Red.es), "Cambiar el titular del dominio", transmission procedure for .es domains, checked September 2026 [T1]
• SolidaWeb, own published pricing at solidaweb.com, reviewed September 2026 [T1]