Every quote has two parts: the hours spent building your site, and the hours spent managing the people who build it. On a small project, the second part can be most of the bill.
Three questions to ask
- How many hours, and on what? Ask for the hours, not just the total.
- Which hours produce something you can see? Building and testing do. Meetings and status reports usually do not.
- Who owns the code and the domain at the end? It should be you.
If your supplier disappeared tomorrow, could another developer pick up the project? If not, you are renting your website, not owning it.