How to Tell If Your Web Developer Is Overcharging You

Most developers are not overcharging you. But the ones who are rely on the same thing: you cannot check their work, so you cannot argue with the invoice.

You can check more than you think.

1. The domain is not in your name

Ask for the login to your domain registrar. If the answer involves a delay, an explanation, or "we manage that for you", that is the single biggest red flag in this industry. Your domain is your business. Renting it back from your developer is not a service.

You can verify this yourself in thirty seconds: search "whois lookup", enter your domain, and look at the registrant.

2. Small changes take a week and cost a lot

Changing a phone number, swapping a photo, updating prices — these are minutes of work. If they are being billed as hours, either the site was built badly or you are being charged for the difficulty of a mess you paid to create.

3. "Maintenance" with nothing to show for it

A maintenance retainer is legitimate: updates, backups, monitoring, security patches, small changes. What makes it illegitimate is the absence of a report. Ask for what was done last month. A real answer exists in about two minutes. A vague one means nothing happened.

4. You cannot see your own analytics

You should have direct access to your Google Analytics and Search Console, in your own account. If traffic numbers only reach you as a screenshot in a monthly email, you cannot verify a single claim being made about performance.

5. Every request is "not possible"

Some things genuinely are not possible, or not sensible. But "not possible" used repeatedly, without an explanation you can follow, usually means "I do not know how" or "I do not want to". A good developer will tell you *why*, and what it would take.

6. The site is slow and this is treated as normal

Open [PageSpeed Insights](https://pagespeed.web.dev), enter your URL, run the mobile test. Under 50 means something is genuinely wrong. Under 30 means the site is losing you customers who close the tab before it loads. This is a free, objective, unarguable number.

7. Nobody has ever said no to you

If your developer has agreed to every single thing you have asked for, without once pushing back on scope, timeline, or whether an idea was worth building, you are being managed rather than advised. The advice is the valuable part.

The four questions

Send these in one email. Watch how long the answers take and how specific they are.

1. Can you confirm the domain, hosting, and analytics accounts are registered in our name, and send us the logins? 2. What was done under the maintenance retainer in the last three months? 3. What is our current mobile PageSpeed score, and what is the plan for it? 4. If we moved to another developer, what would you hand over?

Straight answers to all four means you are probably fine, whatever you are paying. Evasion on question one is enough on its own.

And if it is bad news

Getting out is usually less painful than people expect. Domains can be transferred without the current developer's cooperation in most cases — the registrar has a process for exactly this. Sites can be rebuilt while the old one stays live. Nobody is trapped forever.

If you want a second opinion on where you stand, send us your URL. We will tell you what we find, including when the honest answer is that your current developer is doing fine work and you should keep them.