If You're Half the Price, What's the Catch?
A prospective client asked me this recently, almost apologetically. They'd collected three quotes for moving their mid-size site off Drupal 7. Two agencies came in between $12,000 and $15,000. Mine said $7,500, ten working days. Their procurement instinct — a healthy one — said: the cheap option is cheap for a reason. Find the reason.
It's the right question, so here's the full answer, in public.
The catch people expect
When something costs half as much, buyers assume one of three things: junior people doing the work, corners being cut on quality, or a lowball number that grows once you're committed. Those failure modes are real — the migration market has all three. So let me address them directly.
Junior staff? There is no staff. You get the person with two decades of Drupal work, because a one-specialist operation has nobody to delegate to. Ironically, at a large agency your $14,000 often does buy junior developers, supervised part-time by the senior person whose face was in the sales meeting.
Cut corners? A migration has non-negotiables: all content carried over, URLs preserved so Google rankings survive, security updates current, editors able to do their jobs on day one. These are checklist items, not luxuries, and skipping them creates rework that costs me — a fixed price makes cutting corners self-defeating. The fixed price is your protection here, not just your budget's.
The growing number? The price is fixed after I inspect the site — and I won't give a final number without inspecting it, precisely because blind quotes are where "surprise costs" are born. If something unusual turns up mid-project that inspection couldn't reveal, that's my risk. That's what "fixed" means.
The actual reason for the price gap
The boring truth: cost structure, not quality.
An agency quote carries an office, project managers, account managers, sales staff and the agency's margin on all of the above. None of that is dishonest — it's what full-service agencies cost to run — but you're paying for it whether or not it improves your migration.
The second factor is repetition. Migrations are all I do. The same problems — old modules without modern versions, custom code from 2013, content types that need untangling — show up in site after site, and the tenth time you solve a problem it takes a fraction of the effort of the first. Drupal's own migration tooling does serious heavy lifting when you know it well. A generalist agency that does two migrations a year re-learns this each time, on the client's clock. A specialist amortised that learning long ago.
Half the price doesn't mean half the work went missing. It means the overhead went missing and the practice already happened.
When the expensive quote is the right one
Fair is fair: sometimes $15,000 — or $50,000 — is the correct number. If your site has tens of thousands of pages, e-commerce, complex integrations with other systems, or you genuinely want a redesign and new features as part of the project, a bigger team with a bigger price is a reasonable choice. Specialists are the right tool for a defined job, not for every job.
The problem I keep seeing isn't that big quotes exist. It's that standard, mid-size migrations — a normal organisational site, normal content, no exotic features — get priced as if they were those complex projects, sold to buyers who have no reference point because they'll only ever buy one migration in their life.
How to test any provider — including me
Don't take the reassurance; test it. Ask for references from past migrations. Ask what happens to your URLs and rankings, specifically. Ask what's excluded from the price. Ask what the provider does if the project overruns. And ask them to look at your actual site before the number becomes final.
A provider with nothing to hide finds these questions easy. The quotes that fall apart under them were the catch you were looking for — whatever their price tag said.