How to Tell if Your Kansas City Web Developer Is Overcharging You

Do you actually own your website, domain, and hosting?

You should own all three. If you don't, that's the biggest red flag there is — because it means you can't leave.

Here's the check. Your domain: go to lookup.icann.org, type in your web address, and look at who's listed as the registrant. Is it you, or your business — or is it your developer? (If it's hidden behind privacy protection, the real question is simpler: do you have the login to the account where the domain lives?) Your hosting: do you have your own account, or does your site live inside your developer's? And the big one — if you fired your developer tomorrow, could you walk out the door with your website, or would you be starting over from scratch?

I've talked to people who paid a monthly fee for years and found out they didn't own a single piece of what they were paying for. Domain in the developer's name. Site on the developer's account. The day they wanted to leave, they couldn't — they'd have to rebuild everything. That's not a service. That's a hostage situation with a monthly invoice.

When I build a site, you own everything. The domain, the hosting, every line of code. Always. That's not a premium tier — it's just the floor. It should be everyone's floor.

You paid for "custom" — did you actually get a template?

If you paid custom-website prices for a $50 template, you overpaid. And you can check it in about thirty seconds.

Pull up your homepage. Right-click anywhere and choose "View Page Source" (or just hit Ctrl+U). A wall of code opens — don't panic, you're only looking for one thing. Hit Ctrl+F to search that page and type themes/. If something pops up like /themes/astra/ or /themes/divi/, that's the name of a template. Google it. If it's a theme anyone can buy for fifty bucks, and you paid thousands for a "custom design," you've got a conversation to have with your developer.

Now — templates aren't evil. Plenty of perfectly good sites run on them, and if you agreed to a template at a template price, you got a fair deal. The problem is paying custom prices for template work and never being told the difference. That's the part that isn't fair.

For what it's worth, I hand-code every site I build. No theme, no page builder, nothing you could buy off a shelf. When I say custom, I mean I wrote it.

Can they give you a clear, fixed price — or is it always "it depends"?

A fair developer can tell you what your project costs before you start. If every answer is "it depends" and the bill keeps quietly growing, that's the tell.

The check is simple: ask for a fixed, itemized quote in writing. Not an open-ended hourly rate — a real number for a real scope. Sometimes "it depends" is honest, because the scope genuinely isn't nailed down yet. But "I can't tell you what this will cost" usually means "I'd rather bill you by the hour and let it climb."

And climb it does. Some shops in this market bill north of $200 an hour and treat every integration, every revision, every "quick change" as an hourly extra stacked on top. That's how a $3,000 website quietly becomes an $8,000 one — a little at a time, each invoice reasonable on its own, until you look up and wonder what happened.

What fair looks like: one honest number, quoted up front, no hourly surprises. If you want to know what your project should run, you can get a real number without a sales call attached.

Do they answer your questions in plain English?

A good developer can explain what they're doing in words you understand. If every question gets buried in acronyms or brushed off with "you don't need to worry about the technical side," that's a choice — and usually not one made in your favor.

Jargon is often a wall, not an explanation. You ask "why does this cost that much," and you get a pile of technical terms and a pat on the head. That's not respect for your time — it's a way to stop you asking the next question. You are allowed to understand what you're paying for. Every bit of it. If someone won't explain their work simply, it's fair to wonder whether they can.

Are they promising you guaranteed #1 on Google?

Nobody can guarantee a #1 Google ranking. Anyone who promises one is either lying or doesn't understand how Google works — and either way, keep a hand on your wallet.

Google weighs hundreds of factors, most of them outside any single person's control. A good developer can build you a fast, well-structured, findable site that gives you a genuine shot at ranking. That's real, and it's worth paying for. But "guaranteed first page" is one of the oldest tells in the business. Real results don't come with a promise ribbon on them.

Is your website actually slow?

A slow site is often a sign that corners got cut — and you can check it in about a minute, for free.

Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste in your web address, and look at the mobile score. Under 50 is a problem. Here's why it matters: most of your customers are finding you on their phones, and if your site takes six seconds to load, more than half of them leave before they ever see it. You paid for a website nobody's waiting around for.

Slow usually means someone piled on plugins and a heavy template instead of building the thing right. It's fixable — but it's also a window into how much care went into the work you already paid for.

What fair actually looks like

Fair isn't complicated. You own everything. You get one honest price up front. Your questions get real answers. Your site's fast because it was built right, not padded out. And you're never locked in. That's the whole bar — and it's not a high one. It only feels high because the default is set lower, and the default makes more money.

I started 2k because I grew up with nothing in Kansas City and I know exactly what it feels like to not be able to afford getting taken for a ride. So I built the thing I wished existed for the people I grew up around: an honest number, real work, and a website you actually own.

Run these checks on your current site. Seriously — take ten minutes. Best case, everything checks out and you can stop wondering. Worst case, you finally know what you've been paying for. And if you want to know what your project should actually cost, ask me for a real number — no pressure, no jargon, no hourly surprises. Either way, now you know what to look for.