Let me just say that very few clients state their budgets in rfps, and the ones that do are clients that are usually directly from the industry – being either programmers, or project managers, or other design firms outsourcing work. It is kind of logical to guess why they state their budgets – they roughly know what’s the service gonna cost them and how much they want to pay – because they are in the business. But why is it different with clients that are not Web/design savvy? A part of our job is helping you decide what you need and what you don’t, and eventually what you can afford. Knowing what we are working with helps this immensely and improves the client-firm experience making long lasting fruitful relationships.

Your Budget Helps Define Your Deliverable

Look at it this way – what type of result are you looking for:

• mediocre – we just want the job done as quickly and as cheap as possible
• superawesome – we want you to make us the best Web site you ever built

Now, the problem is not in the client wanting the most bang for their buck (who doesn’t?), but in not making it clear enough what resources are there at disposal. Stating your budget helps us (designers) define the level of “awesomeness” your site is going to have.

If we know the budget we can

• know how many people we are able to bring on board
• having more people on board means less time is needed to complete the project – faster turnaround, people are able to work simultaneously
• when everyone is able to focus on their job that they are specialized for, every aspect of the site (from code, information design, programming to logo design and illustration) will receive the proper attention it deserves thus increasing the quality of work
• last but not least – we don’t have to ballpark – people usually want a quote after they fill out the questionnaire and submit the rfp, that’s nearly impossible, so we’re forced to ballpark the figures and sometimes the client is at a loss, and sometimes we are, very rarely is the case where the estimate is precise simply because of the lack of specification or information about the project

If we don’t know the budget – we have to guess

Those guesses are very tough because it usually means design firms have to overshoot the estimate to compensate (in front) for the extra work that will have to be done – but what if there is no extra work? Yes, you’re right, you still ended up paying for it.

For you as a client it’s always better to state your budget up front – say our budget is $1000-$2000 (the figures are imaginary) and we need this, this and this. In our case, we really quote honestly and our quotes are always based on the number of working hours that are needed to complete the project.

* In this article I am using the Web/design industry as an example but it is very likely that all this still stands in other industries as well