Judge a proposal on five things: whether it restates your goal in your words, whether the scope is specific enough to argue about, whether the timeline names dependencies, whether the price breaks down by deliverable, and whether reporting and exit terms are written down. Comparing proposals on total price alone is how brands end up buying the least amount of work.
A scoring checklist
Score each proposal out of five on the points below and the right choice usually becomes obvious.
- -Restates your business goal and target metric accurately.
- -Lists deliverables in countable units: pages, templates, creatives, articles, reports.
- -Names who does what, and what they need from you and when.
- -Breaks price down per deliverable or per workstream, with assumptions stated.
- -Defines reporting cadence, review gates, notice period and asset ownership.
Normalise before you compare
Two quotes for a website are rarely the same job. Rewrite each into the same table - page count, template count, copywriting included or not, photography, integrations, SEO setup, analytics, post-launch support - and the cheaper one often turns out to be a smaller scope rather than better value.
- 01Countable deliverables beat adjectives.
- 02Normalise scopes into one table before comparing price.
- 03Reporting, review gates and ownership belong in the proposal.