Freelancer or Agency? Who Should Build Your Website and How It Usually Ends
Two quotes for the same website sit on the desk of a renovation company. One comes from a guy who builds sites after hours and wants PLN 2,800. The other comes from an agency with a tidy PDF, a schedule and a figure of PLN 7,400. Both describe roughly the same thing: a site with subpages, a contact form, a mobile version, deployment. The gap is nearly five thousand, and nobody can explain exactly what it buys.
This decision is rarely settled on design quality, because at that point nobody has seen anything yet. It gets settled in month three and in year two: who picks up the phone when the price list changes, whose name the domain sits under, and what a small fix costs when nobody planned for it. Below I take both routes apart, with real ranges, a list of questions to ask before signing, and an honest note about when neither option is what you need.
What you actually buy when you pay an agency
An agency is not an expensive freelancer. It is a different product, and most of what you pay for is process and the fact that people are replaceable.
In a decent agency several people touch the project: someone handles the client, someone designs, someone builds, sometimes someone writes copy. When the designer takes a holiday, the project does not stop, because the tasks live in a system rather than in one person’s head. You get a contract with deadlines, an invoice without having to chase it, an agreed number of revision rounds and someone accountable for the whole thing even if the person doing the work changes. On bigger projects that continuity earns its price.
You also pay for things a small business site may never need: workshops, competitor analysis, a visual design drawn from scratch, testing across a dozen devices, documentation. A car repair shop with three lifts ends up buying a process built for corporate clients and paying the full rate for it.
A freelancer: cheaper and closer, but it all hangs on one person
A freelancer is often the better choice, and not only because of price. You talk to the person who actually builds the site instead of an account manager relaying your notes. Decisions happen in a single phone call. There is no margin covering an office and a salesperson, so the same money buys more hours of work.
The risk is single and very concrete: it all hangs on one person. Freelancers get sick, travel, take a full-time job and stop answering in the evenings because they have a new employer. The story I hear most often goes like this. The site got built, ran fine for three years, then a new service had to be added and the number stopped answering. The company was left with files nobody could access and hosting paid from somebody else’s card.
The second issue is range of skills. One person is rarely a strong designer, a strong developer and a strong copywriter at once. Usually they are strong in one of the three. If the strength is in code, you will be writing the copy yourself, and copy is exactly where most projects stall. What to have ready so you do not get stuck there is covered in the piece on what to prepare before ordering a website.
The ranges: what it costs and how long it takes
The figures below apply to a brochure site for a small service business: a few subpages, a contact form, a mobile version, no shop and no integrations. Market spreads can be wider, and the full cost breakdown lives in the post on how much a business website costs.
| Freelancer | Small agency (2-8 people) | Large agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price of a brochure site | PLN 1,500-4,000 | PLN 4,000-9,000 | from PLN 10,000 |
| From enquiry to launch | 2-5 weeks | 4-10 weeks | 8-16 weeks |
| Who writes the copy | usually you | copywriter included or extra | copywriter on staff |
| A fix a year later | PLN 100-200/hour, if they answer | PLN 150-300 per ticket | hours bundled in the contract |
| Main risk | one person disappears | your account manager rotates | procedure instead of a conversation |
| Contract and invoice | varies a lot | usually yes | always |
Look closely at the third row, because it causes more delays than anything else. If the quote says nothing about copy, it means you are writing it. In the evening, after twelve hours on site.
Seven questions before you sign
These questions take five minutes and save thousands. Ask both the freelancer and the agency, then compare not just the answers but how confidently they come.
- Whose name goes on the domain? The right answer is your company’s details, not the contractor’s.
- Where does the hosting live and will I get access to it? “With us, you won’t need it” is the answer that becomes a problem three years later.
- Do I receive the complete site files when we finish? If not, you are renting a website rather than buying one.
- How many revision rounds are included and what does the next one cost?
- Who writes the copy and is it in the price?
- What happens after launch, precisely: who patches, who updates, what does it cost per month?
- Can I have two links to sites you built a year ago or earlier? Anyone can show fresh work. What survived twelve months is the interesting part.
Red flags
No contract on anything above a couple of thousand. Even a short document with scope, deadline and payment terms protects both sides, and its absence usually means the contractor is not sure what they promised.
A portfolio made of screenshots with no links. A screenshot can come from any template. Ask for addresses and open them on your phone.
Hosting “with us” with no panel details and no word about what happens when the relationship ends. That is the most common way small business owners get locked in.
A price far below the others for the same scope. It normally means something is missing from the quote: the copy, the mobile version, the privacy policy, or hosting in year two.
Zero questions about your business on the first call. Someone who never asks who your customers are and where your calls come from today is going to sell you a template.
The real costs start after launch
The build invoice is usually less than half of what a site costs over three years. The rest is hosting and the domain, a maintenance fee if the site runs on a plugin-based system, and the small changes nobody predicted: a new service, a new number, new photos, changed opening hours.
It helps to separate two things sold under one name. Technical care for a plugin-based site means patching and updating so nothing breaks. Content and analytics care is a different animal: watching whether the site brings enquiries at all, and adding pages for what people actually search for. The first follows from architecture, the second from the fact that markets move. I broke that down in the post on what website care is worth paying for.
Ask about those costs before signing, as annual figures. A contractor who can quote them off the top of their head has been through this many times.
When neither option is what you need
If what you need is a site that shows what you do, where you work and how to reach you, both routes are overkill. You are paying calendar weeks and several thousand for work that is repeatable once the scope is well defined.
At Sitario a system does that same scope: you describe the business in a form, and about an hour later you look at a finished site with copy, design, a mobile version and a contact form. You pay after seeing it, so there is no deposit paid blind. The Start plan is a one-off PLN 249 including the first year of hosting, and renewal from year two costs PLN 149 a year. The domain is registered in your name, you can download the site source at any time, and after launch you get a panel with an editor, statistics and an inbox for form enquiries. The wider difference between a person doing the work and a system doing it sits in the comparison of an agency website versus an AI generator.
This is not for everyone. If you need a shop with payments, a booking system wired into your calendar, a quote calculator, or a site built around a brand identity designed from zero, you need a human being. At that point the only question left is freelancer or agency, and you are back at the table above.
Deciding in five minutes
Count how many subpages you genuinely need and whether the project contains a single feature you cannot describe in one sentence. If there is none, do not hire anyone to assemble a brochure. If there is one, pick a freelancer with a written contract and every access sitting on your side. If there are several, the deadlines are fixed, brand matters and the budget passes ten thousand, take an agency and treat the process as part of the product.
Whatever you choose, lock down three things on the day you sign: the domain in your name, access to the hosting, and the complete files when the work ends. Everything else can be fixed later. Those three can block a company for years.