How to compare quotes properly

Compare the total, over the term

The headline price is almost never the thing you are buying. A stairlift with a low install price and a mandatory £250 annual service contract costs more over five years than a dearer lift with two years included. A £12 per vehicle tracking subscription is £720 per vehicle over a five-year term. A £39 a month website is a finance agreement.

So the first thing to work out for every quote is the total you will have paid at the end of the commitment period, including anything that recurs. Write that number down. It is frequently in a different order from the headline prices.

Make the quotes describe the same thing

Quotes diverge most when the brief is loose. Two solar installers will propose different system sizes; two web agencies will assume different amounts of content work; two payroll bureaus will include different tasks. You are then comparing interpretations, not prices.

The fix is to write one specification and send exactly the same one to everybody. It does not need to be long. It needs to state what you want, how much of it, and what you are not doing yourself. Where a supplier proposes something different, that is useful information — but ask them to price your version too, so one line stays comparable.

Find the unit price

Totals hide sizing decisions. Unit prices do not. Cost per kW installed for solar. Cost per payslip per month for payroll. Cost per collection for waste. Cost per aid, not per pair, for hearing aids. Cost per door for access control.

Reduce every quote to its unit price and the outliers become obvious immediately — including the supplier who is cheap because they have quoted for less than you asked for.

Read the exit before the entry

The terms that cost people money are rarely about price. They are contract length, notice period, automatic renewal, and whether annual increases are capped. Commercial waste, vehicle tracking, alarm monitoring and invoice finance all run on long contracts with automatic renewal as standard.

Before you sign anything, know: how long the term is, how much notice you must give, what date you must give it by, and what an early exit costs. Put the notice date in a calendar the same day you sign, because you will not remember in three years and the supplier is not going to remind you.

Separate the price from the pressure

A discount that expires when the salesperson leaves your house is not a discount, it is a closing technique. It appears most often in exactly the categories bought under stress: stairlifts, hearing aids, home improvements. There is no commercial reason a stairlift price should be valid for one hour.

If you are told an offer ends today, the correct response is to let it end. A supplier who genuinely wants the work will re-quote. One who will not was never the right choice.

Three quotes, not two, and not seven

Two quotes tell you nothing about which is unusual. Three is enough to see the shape of the market, and it is where most of the value sits. Beyond about four you are spending time for very little additional information, and in categories that involve home visits you are spending a lot of time.

The exception is anything highly bespoke — a curved stairlift, a custom website, a complex commercial insurance risk — where a fourth quote can still move the price materially because the variation between suppliers is genuinely large.