We rebuild a lot of cheap websites, which gives us an unfair advantage in this argument: we see the invoices from both ends. So let’s do the accounting properly — including the part most agencies skip, where the cheap option is genuinely correct.
What RM1,500 actually buys
A template, your logo dropped into it, your brochure text pasted in, and a launch. Nobody asked who your customers are or what the site should achieve, because at that price nobody can afford to ask. The site is not bad, exactly. It is generic — and generic is invisible.
Where the money leaks
The enquiries that never arrive
This is the big one and it never appears on an invoice. Suppose your average customer is worth RM2,000 and a site built around your buyers would produce four more enquiries a month, with one closing. That is roughly RM24,000 a year of quiet loss — sixteen times the “savings”, every year the site stays up.
The rebuild you were always going to need
Cheap sites get replaced in eighteen months to two years, usually right after a big marketing push exposes them. You pay for a website twice, plus the campaign that ran against the weak one.
The hostage situation
The classic pattern: the domain is registered under the vendor’s name, hosting is a mystery login the vendor holds, and when you want to move, the relationship turns commercial in the wrong direction. We have seen release fees that exceeded the original build. Whatever you pay, always own your own domain, hosting account and code.
The compounding small stuff
No backups when the site gets hacked. No updates until something breaks during Raya orders. Every tiny text change a paid ticket with a one-week turnaround. Individually small; together, a second invoice that never stops.
When cheap is the right call
Fairness requires this section. A RM1,500 template site is the correct choice when:
- You are validating a new business and may pivot within the year;
- All your sales genuinely close on WhatsApp, referrals or a marketplace, and the site only needs to prove you exist;
- You need a placeholder while a real project is scoped and budgeted.
In those cases, buy cheap proudly — just keep ownership of the domain and skip the long hosting contract, because the site’s job is to be replaced.
The question that settles it
Don’t ask “how much does the website cost?” Ask “what is a customer worth to me, and how many does the website need to produce to pay for itself?” For a business where one customer is worth five figures, the maths rarely favours the template. For a weekend stall, it rarely favours us. Both answers are fine — what’s expensive is not doing the maths.