Published 22 July 2026 · 5 min
Why studios hide their prices, and what sits behind that
What actually drives the cost of a website or an identity, and why request a quote usually means we would like to look at you first.
Open ten agency sites in Tashkent. Nine will show an enquiry form where the price should be. This is not a conspiracy and there are sound reasons for it, but it does not help the buyer: comparing offers becomes impossible, and the first call turns into an attempt to guess your budget.
Three honest reasons to hide a price
First, the scope genuinely is unknown. An enterprise system for a factory and one for a corner shop share a name and differ by a factor of a hundred. Here individual quoting is simply true.
Second, the contractor works through subcontractors and its own cost floats. It cannot state a price in advance because it does not know one.
Third, price depends on urgency. Rush work really does cost more, because somebody works the weekend.
And one dishonest reason
The price adapts to the buyer. The same landing page costs four million for a sole trader and twelve for a bank. Formally this is called value based pricing. In practice it means you pay according to how your logo looks in an email signature.
What the cost is actually made of
Take a landing page. The work splits into predictable parts, and nearly every one can be estimated in advance:
- Structure and narrative: one to two days, if the client understands their product
- Desktop and mobile design: three to five days
- Build: three to four days
- Forms, analytics, hosting: one day
- Revisions: budgeted up front, usually two rounds
That is roughly ten to fifteen working days. Multiply by a studio day rate and you have the price. We arrived at 4 500 000 soum and published it.
When a price cannot be named
Some work genuinely cannot be estimated honestly in advance. Enterprise systems, integrations with existing software, migrating data out of a legacy program. Any figure before discovery is fiction.
The right answer there is not request a quote but discovery first, it costs this much, and it produces an estimate. That is honest and checkable: you pay a small amount and receive a document you can take to any contractor.
What to do as a buyer
Ask not what a website costs but what this specific scope costs. Ask for a stage by stage breakdown. If a contractor cannot break the work into parts, either they have not done it before, or they would rather you could not compare.