Wouldn't you chase pop for cheap

The reason for writing this note was a discussion that erupted on an article about tourist sites, the specifics of their creation and pricing. And the quote, which became the epigraph for the note, belongs to the top manager of one of the agencies that participated in the discussion and developed travel sites for just 8,000 rubles and even 4,000 rubles.

Where did the firewood come from?

Honestly, I was intrigued. How the metropolitan agency, selling sites at such a price, manages to exist. And in order to understand where such amounts came from, we decided to calculate a little and pulled out our data on the labor costs of creating a simple site such as a business card from the storerooms. Calculations on the tourist site were postponed until later.

So, according to the calculations of labor costs of the Internet Client studio, a standard small site with a unique design requires about 20 hours of work for several employees: a manager, programmer, designer, layout designer, content designer and tester. 20 hours of studio work, estimated in salaries, the cost of jobs and depreciation of equipment, compulsory insurance and tax payments from salaries - this is about 17,000 rubles or 850 rubles per hour. This is the cost and price of a standard simple site without taking into account the license, in the case of choosing a paid CMS. And now we add profit here (it should somehow be), take into account the need to invest a certain amount in the development fund (updating software, equipment, etc.), personnel training costs (also not enough), taxes (to sleep peacefully). To at least keep the company afloat mortgage in excess of cost will have at least 10,000 rubles. The result - at least 27,000 for a site with a unique design on a free engine. But this is a site with an individual design. We took him for shooting, and the results of such a comparison will not be representative.

We are trying to reduce the cost and refuse a unique design. By the way, for many representatives of small businesses and small travel agencies, the rejection of a unique design is the only right decision, because it is extremely difficult to make a design unique and of high quality within the minimum budget. Excluding the unique design, they also built a ready-made boxed solution to minimize the participation of expensive specialists in the creation of the project. The break-even cost of a box-type standard site such as a business card was reduced to 10,000 rubles. Excluding Bitrix license payment. Everything is clear with the business card, let’s take up the travel site.

How much and why

As for tourism sites specifically, more work is needed here, because the travel site has its own specifics, in particular architecture, which involves the interconnection of country catalog modules, resorts and hotels, as well as the presence of freely switchable connectors with search engines for travel systems. But the boxed solution in this case also comes out much cheaper than creating a project from scratch.

By the way, the price tag for these resources in the web development market ranges from 500,000 to 25,000, when developing a site from scratch. And from 13,000 to 4,000 and even 1,500 rubles for finished resources. 500 000 is a unique and exclusive design, a dynamic prototype, a personal manager, good coffee at meetings, a comfortable meeting room, and a worthy impressive portfolio. 13,000 for a complete boxed solution is also understandable. But where do the prices for the tour site in the lower price segment come from - 25,000 and 1,500 rubles? What travel site can I make for these amounts? There are several options for justifying such proposals:

• All without exception, cheap and mega-cheap sites are made on free CMS. If we talk about simple business card sites and typical tourist resources, then most often we use WordPress and our own development admins,
• Flies Website - separately, SEO cutlets - separately. The simplest technique is when a site is built without taking into account any SEO requirements, even such simple features as automatic title formation. Moreover, some sites at dumping prices are sold generally with the SEO module disabled. You want - pick and turn it on yourself. If you don’t want or cannot, we will do it for an additional fee,
• Template design is natural,
• Incomplete screening. When “design-development-implementation” is written on the website in the tariff, contract or TK, these three points can subsequently be inflated to very impressive numbers. Or vice versa, when the item "filling content" is limited to filling the main and contact page. All. “What did you want for that amount? Here are the pages - here is the content. ” After all, how much and what to fill with is not specified.

Of course, it’s almost impossible to allocate 25, 30, 60, 100 thousand rubles to a site with an individual design and a bunch of cool lotions for a startup and a beginner travel agency that has not yet reached a stable profit. And it is not necessary. At the first stage, a fairly inexpensive box-based ready-made solution is enough for the eyes. Moreover, the difference of 6-9 thousand rubles between a high-quality and “ready-made” site will be almost invisible to the budget now, but it will come up with problems with usability, promotion, refinement and expansion of functionality later.

And yes ...
• Exceptions are always possible from the rule. Rarely, but possible. Sometimes the dumping price for a very decent site is set for quick entry into the market or at the first order, achieving customer loyalty,
• A ready-made website with a template design that is quite appropriate for a start-up company will be mauvais ton for a well-known travel network,
• And what is cheap for a Moscow travel agency can be prohibitively expensive for a regional one.

So our little study concerned only proposals for Moscow. But whatever one may say, regions or Moscow, if you go over different price offers and finished works, in most cases you have to agree with the correctness of the wise popular proverb “it doesn’t get cheap cheap”.