Twice this year, business owners have come to me with the same story. They paid someone Rp 2 to 3 million for a company website. Two years later they cannot log in, cannot update a phone number, cannot find the site on Google, and cannot even prove they own the domain. Now they are paying Rp 15 to 25 million to rebuild everything from scratch.
Cheap website problems have a specific shape: they are invisible on delivery day and expensive on every day after. The site looks fine in the screenshot the vendor sends you. The rot is in everything the screenshot does not show.
This is not an argument that expensive is better. I have seen overpriced garbage too. This is an argument that you should know exactly what the cheap quote leaves out, because you will pay for those omissions later, with interest.
What the Rp 2 Million Quote Quietly Omits
A serious website, even a small one, includes things a rock-bottom quote cannot afford to include. Here is what gets cut, in the order I usually find the bodies.
1. Ownership of your own assets
The most common and most painful one. The vendor registers the domain under their own name, hosts the site on their shared account, and keeps every password. While the relationship is good, this feels like convenience. When the vendor disappears, changes phone numbers, or simply stops replying, you discover you own nothing.
One retail owner I helped had been running Instagram ads pointing to a domain he did not legally control. When the domain expired, the vendor was unreachable, and a domain squatter picked it up within days. Getting a similar domain and reprinting materials cost more than the original site did, several times over.
Minimum standard: the domain is registered under your name or company, in a registrar account you control, and you hold admin access to hosting and CMS. No exceptions, no "we will handle it for you."
2. Anyone answering the phone next year
Cheap builds are usually one-person side projects. That person is doing volume to make the economics work, which means support is whoever has time, which means nobody. The site breaks after a plugin update, the contact form silently stops sending, the SSL certificate expires and Chrome starts warning your customers away, and your emails go unanswered.
A fair quote includes either a maintenance retainer or an honest statement that maintenance is not included, priced per incident. A Rp 2 million quote includes silence.
3. Mobile that actually works
Most Indonesian traffic is mobile, often well past 70 percent for consumer businesses. Cheap builds are assembled on a desktop, checked on a desktop, and delivered on a desktop. The buttons overlap on a mid-range Android phone, the images take eight seconds on a 4G connection, and the WhatsApp button covers the address.
Your customers will not report this. They will just leave.
4. Basic findability on Google
I do not mean aggressive SEO campaigns. I mean the boring fundamentals: page titles that describe the business, pages that load in under a few seconds, an SSL certificate, a sitemap, and the site actually being submitted to Google Search Console. Skip these and you have built a brochure and locked it in a drawer. When someone searches your own business name plus your city, a Facebook page from 2016 outranks you.
5. A codebase anyone can touch
This is the engineer in me talking, but it lands on your invoice eventually. Bottom-price sites are built on pirated themes, abandoned page builders, or a tangle of copied code. The next developer you hire will open it, quote you a rebuild, and be right to do so. Nothing is salvageable. You are not paying for improvement, you are paying to start over.
The Real Math: Paying Twice Is the Cheap Option
Let me put plausible numbers on the pattern, based on what I keep seeing:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Original cheap build | Rp 2,500,000 |
| Lost domain, rebranding materials | Rp 4,000,000 |
| Two years of a broken contact form (leads lost) | Unknown, and that is the point |
| Full rebuild with a competent vendor | Rp 18,000,000 |
| Total | Rp 24,500,000 plus invisible losses |
Compare that to Rp 10 to 15 million spent once on a properly owned, maintained, mobile-first site. The cheap site was never Rp 2.5 million. It was a down payment on the expensive path. The drivers behind honest pricing are not mysterious, and I broke them down in What Actually Drives the Cost of Custom Software; the same logic applies at website scale.
How to Screen a Vendor in Ten Minutes
You do not need technical knowledge to filter out most future regret. Ask these questions before paying anything:
- "The domain and hosting will be under my name and my accounts, correct?" Any hesitation is your answer.
- "Show me two sites you built more than a year ago." Then open them on your phone, on mobile data. Are they alive, fast, and maintained?
- "What happens when something breaks in month eight?" Listen for a concrete process and a price, not "just contact me."
- "What do I receive on handover?" The right answer includes all credentials, and ideally the source files.
- "Why is your price what it is?" A good vendor can itemize. A bad one gets offended.
None of this requires paying top rates. There are honest builders at modest prices; they are the ones who answer these five questions without flinching.
When Cheap Is Actually Fine
Fairness requires saying this: sometimes a minimal site is the right call. Testing a new business idea, a single landing page for one campaign, a placeholder while the real business takes shape. In those cases, use a mainstream website builder yourself, keep the account in your name, and spend almost nothing. That is cheap done deliberately, with eyes open, and it is completely different from a cheap "professional" build that pretends to be the real thing.
The problem is never the low price. The problem is not knowing what the low price excludes, and a website is one part of a bigger question anyway, which is whether your business has any technology direction at all. I made that case in Why Your Business Needs a Technology Strategy, Not Just a Website.
The Takeaway
Cheap website problems follow a schedule: invisible at launch, annoying in month six, expensive in year two. The Rp 2 million site is rarely a Rp 2 million decision. Before you sign, confirm you will own your domain and accounts, see the vendor's old work on a phone, and get maintenance terms in writing. Ten minutes of questions now is worth twenty million rupiah later.
And if you already have the broken version of this story and need to decide what is salvageable, get an independent technical opinion before paying for the rebuild. Sometimes the answer is smaller than a full restart.