Somebody offers you a website for five hundred dollars. That is a real offer and plenty of people take it, and I understand why. Money is money and a website feels like a website.
But that number is not the price. It is the deposit.
Where the rest of the invoice shows up
It is slow, because it is a bloated theme with unoptimized images. So some percentage of people leave before it loads. You will never see that number. It just quietly happens forever.
It does not really work on a phone. That is most of your traffic. Again, invisible. Nobody calls you to say your site was annoying on their commute.
You cannot edit it. So every small change is an email and a wait and sometimes a fee, or you just stop updating it and your hours have been wrong since last Christmas.
And in two or three years it needs replacing entirely, because there is nothing underneath worth keeping. So you pay again, from zero.
Run the actual three year number
Five hundred to build. A few hundred in change requests. Then a full rebuild in year three because the first one had no foundation.
Against a build that costs more up front and is still working in year five with a care plan on it.
The second one is usually cheaper. Not always. But usually, and by a wider margin than people expect.
To be fair to cheap
Sometimes cheap is the correct decision. You are testing whether the business works. You need something up in a week. You have five hundred dollars and that is the honest situation.
Then do cheap on purpose. Pick a simple template, keep it small, own the domain and the hosting yourself, and plan to replace it. That is not a mistake. That is a decision with a known ending.
The bad version is thinking you bought something permanent.
The question that sorts it
Ask whoever is quoting you: what does this look like in three years.
If the answer is a shrug, you are buying the cheap kind. If the answer is a real plan for maintenance and eventual updates, you are buying the other kind, whatever the number on the invoice says.