Write a brief any web supplier can quote against

The most expensive thing about commissioning a website is not the build. It is receiving three quotes that answer three different questions, and having no way to tell which is the cheap one.

That happens because the brief was a sentence. “We need a new website, can you send me a price.” Each supplier fills the gaps with their own assumptions — one includes copywriting and one does not, one assumes five pages and one assumes fifteen — and the figures that come back are not comparable at all.

This produces the other kind of brief.

Build your brief

This generator needs JavaScript. It assembles the brief in your browser and sends nothing anywhere, so there is no server version to fall back to. The questions it asks are below — a brief written by hand against this list is worth exactly as much.

1. The business: name, what it does, where it operates, who its customers are.
2. What the site must do, in one sentence, and what a visitor must be able to do.
3. Scope: rough page count, whether a site already exists, what it must connect to.
4. What you can supply: words, photographs, brand materials.
5. Practicalities: deadline, budget range, who signs off.

What it does

Five steps of questions, most of which you can answer in a sentence. At the end it assembles a Markdown document you can download, copy, or paste into an email.

Every answer you leave blank is printed as not answered rather than quietly dropped. That is deliberate: a gap a supplier can see is one they will ask about, and a gap they cannot see is one they will fill with a guess that ends up in the price.

It also appends ten questions for the supplier — GST treatment, exclusions, revision rounds, ownership on final payment, the redirect plan, ongoing costs and what happens if the project is not delivered. Those are the questions that make two quotes comparable, and they are the ones people think of after signing.

Nothing is sent anywhere

The brief is assembled in your browser. There is no server, no account, no storage, and no request leaves the page. That is not a promise about our conduct — the site’s content security policy restricts form submissions to this origin, so there is nowhere for it to go.

And the result is not gated. You do not exchange an email address for it. A tool whose purpose is to make a purchase legible cannot reasonably charge for legibility, and the version of this that captures your details before showing you your own answers would contradict everything else on this site.

Before you send it

Send the same brief to at least three suppliers. Read the exclusions before the figures. And check whether each quote states its GST treatment, because a quote that does not is not yet a price — why two quotes for the same site differ covers the rest of that conversation.

If you are not sure how much site you actually need, what a small business actually needs is the shorter route to a scope.