We get asked this a lot: 'Why would I pay ten times what the guy on Facebook is quoting?' Fair question. Here's the honest answer.
What the cheap option actually is
A RM1,000 to RM2,000 website is almost always a pre-built WordPress theme with your logo dropped in and four pages of text. It will look fine on the day it launches. Then the compounding problems start.
- Theme updates break the site; you pay the freelancer to fix it, or it stays broken.
- Performance is whatever the theme ships with, usually 4 to 8 seconds on mobile.
- SEO is a checkbox someone ticked, not a strategy.
- You don't own the design system, so any future brand work starts from scratch.
What a proper build costs, and why
A custom site from a studio like ours sits in the RM15k to RM40k range for SMEs. That's design direction, a real build, a performance target, analytics, SEO groundwork, and a codebase you own cleanly. It's not 'more expensive'. It's a different product.
When cheap is the right answer
If you genuinely just need a placeholder, such as a one-page site while you figure out the business, a template is fine. Just be honest that it's a placeholder, and budget for the real thing within 18 months.
