Access and continuity
Vendor selection and total cost
Judging a supplier on what the work costs over its life — including the rebuild — rather than on the quotation.
Also called TCO · Total cost of ownership
Formula
TCO = Build + Changes over the period + Rebuild probability × Rebuild cost + Revenue lost while it does not work
- Build
- the quoted price, which is the only term most decisions use
- Changes
- what each subsequent edit costs, and whether anyone but the original vendor can make it
- Rebuild probability
- the honest chance the work has to be redone by someone else
- Revenue lost
- the months a business trades on something that does not convert, rank or stay up
The variable is not where the supplier is. It is accountability, ownership and whether anyone can continue the work — and those are decided by the price point and the contract, not by geography. There are excellent engineers in every market on earth and there is unaccountable work in all of them, including expensive agencies in this one.
What a price far below the market actually buys is a set of shortcuts, and they are predictable enough to list. The domain and the accounts registered to the supplier rather than the company. A pirated theme or an unlicensed plugin, which is a legal exposure and an unpatchable one. Customer data on a server nobody can name. No documentation, no repository, no handover, so the next vendor quotes a rebuild rather than a change. Bought followers and paid links, which are covered separately here because their damage outlives the contract. And no one to answer when it breaks — which, in a jurisdiction where the supplier has no presence, is not a legal question but a practical one.
The defensible way to buy cheaply is to buy something small and complete rather than something large and abandoned: a fixed scope, written down, with handover in the contract and ownership in the company's name from the first day. Price is a legitimate constraint. Unaccountability is not a way to meet it.
- Quotation A
- AED 1,500
- Rebuilt within a year, in our experience of inheriting them
- likely
- Rebuild by a second vendor
- AED 15,000
- Six months trading on a site that does not convert or rank
- opportunity cost
- Quotation B
- AED 15,000, handed over
The cheap quotation is only cheap if it is never redone. Once it is, the business has paid AED 16,500 for the same asset, waited a year for it, and lost whatever the intervening months were worth. The saving was never on the build; it was a bet against the rebuild.
One quotation includes the specification, the search architecture, the CMS, the analytics and the handover; the other includes the pages. They are compared on the number. Write the scope first — down to who owns the domain on completion — and send the same document to everyone, or the comparison is between a price and a hope.
The term is a reading taken at a point in a sequence that is already running. These are the sequences, with the place each of them jams.
- From a brief to work somebody has accepted
- A piece of paid work, travelling from the sentence that started it to the moment the buyer agrees it is finished and can carry it without the supplier. 6 steps, acceptance by demonstration is the arrangement that fails while looking reasonable.
Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.
- Writing a specification you can accept work against
- “Here is the brief. Redesign the site, improve the funnel, modernise the stack.” · 60 minutes, 5 questions.
- Reading a quotation for technical work
- “The whole project comes to AED 45,000, four to six weeks.” · 30 minutes, 5 questions.
A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.
- Private consulting
- Advice you cannot act on without us is not advice.
- Taking a product into a new market
- A campaign can only sell what the market is allowed to buy.
- M&A audit and deal review
- Price the system you are buying, not the one in the data room.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.