Answer in brief
“Turnkey” describes a feeling of completeness, not an agreed scope of work. Here is which lines usually sit outside the quote, how to move scope into contract language, and what to ask a contractor before signing anything.
“Turnkey” is a promise, not a scope of work
The phrase is borrowed from construction: you hand over the keys, come back later, and everything works. On a quote for a company website the same phrase becomes a finite list of line items, and anything absent from that list is billed separately. The gap between the promise and the list is where almost every uncomfortable late invoice comes from.
This is usually not bad faith. A studio prices what it knows how to price: pages, layouts, front-end work, integrations, testing. Copywriting, photography, the domain, business mail, legal pages and analytics configuration sit on the boundary — both sides assume them and neither writes them down. In a contract, an assumption does not exist.
So the more useful question is not what a turnkey website costs, but which lines that particular key opens. What follows is the working difference between what a buyer usually believes is included, what is most often excluded, and how to move both halves into contract language before anybody starts work.
What the buyer hears and what the studio prices
In the buyer's head the phrase reads roughly like this: I hand over a logo and describe the company, and a few weeks later I get a live site on my own address, with company mail, finished copy, photographs, a working enquiry form and visitor statistics. That expectation is reasonable; it is roughly how a furnished apartment is sold.
In the studio's head the same phrase usually means design and build of an agreed number of pages, filled with material the client supplies, published on hosting the client pays for. Both readings are honest. The problem is that neither of them is said out loud before the contract is signed.
Reconciling them takes half an hour. Each side separately writes down what will be on screen on acceptance day and who produced it. The difference between those two lists is your future extra invoices, seen early, while there is still time to negotiate them calmly.
The lines most often left outside the quote
The exclusion list barely changes from project to project: copy and editing, photography and illustration, the domain, hosting, business mail, analytics and goal configuration, legal pages, translation into other languages, and the handover of source files and accounts. Each line is small on its own; together they add up to a second budget.
The amount matters less than the timing. These invoices do not arrive at the start, while the budget is still open, but at the end, when the site is nearly finished, the launch date is public, and negotiating feels awkward. That is where the lasting impression of a project that grew comes from, although the price was simply incomplete.
The sensible response is not to hunt for a studio where everything is included. If it genuinely is, the cost of that work still sits inside the price and you simply cannot see it. The sensible response is to see the lines early and distribute them: some to the contractor, some to your team, some deferred to a second phase.
Domain, hosting and mail: three separate subscriptions
A domain is not bought once and forever. It is a registration for a term that has to be renewed, and it is held in a specific owner's name. If it is registered to the contractor, you are renting your own name. Registering to the company and holding the registrar login is far cheaper on day one than migrating a year later.
Hosting is the second subscription and business mail is the third. Most buyers discover the third one at the moment they ask for an address like info@ and hear that it is a separate service on a separate bill. None of the three is part of development, and yet without them the company does not have a working site.
In a contract this is settled with one table: who registers each item, whose name it is in, who pays for the first year, where the invoice goes, and what happens to the subscriptions once the project closes. The table takes a page and removes almost every later argument about whose responsibility it was.
Copy and photography: the most common extra invoice
A layout has to be filled with real words. If the words are missing the project stops, and it usually stops after the design has been approved and paid for. Copywriting is separate work with its own schedule: interviews, page structure, a draft, revisions, a proofread. It is either in the quote or it is on you.
Photography behaves the same way. Stock covers backgrounds and abstractions but does not show your office, your product or your people, which is what keeps a visitor on the page. A shoot is a separate day, a separate budget and a separate licence: where the images may appear, for how long and in which countries.
The workable compromise looks like this: the contractor supplies page structure and a list of questions, you answer in plain language, and an editor brings it to publishable quality. That is cheaper than writing from nothing and more honest than hoping the copy will appear over the weekend before launch.
Legal pages and analytics: work nobody puts on the list
A privacy policy is not decorative. The GDPR.eu guidance is explicit: a privacy notice has to be provided at the moment data is collected, in concise and plain language, and it has to name specific things — who you are, why you collect the data, on what legal basis, how long you keep it and what rights the person has.
Analytics is work too, not a checkbox. Installing a tag is not enough: somebody has to decide what counts as an enquiry, configure the events, verify that the form actually fires them, and agree who reads the reports and how often. Without that, three months later nobody can answer whether the site is working.
Neither line usually appears in a proposal, because neither of them looks like a website. Put both in the quote explicitly, even at zero cost with a note that the client will handle it. A zero in a contract carries more information than a line that is simply missing.
Speed and search: a testable criterion instead of a feeling
A fast site is taste, not an acceptance criterion. A testable version reads differently: web.dev describes three Core Web Vitals — LCP, INP and CLS — with thresholds of 2.5 seconds, 200 milliseconds and 0.1, assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads. A condition like that can be written into a contract and checked.
Search deserves the opposite adjustment. The Google Search Central starter guide states that the vast majority of sites are found and added automatically, and that submitting a sitemap helps but is not required. So getting you indexed is not a service in itself. The service is structure, speed, markup and the content on the page.
Acceptance as a whole should be a list of testable statements: forms deliver mail to a named address, that mail arrives, the metrics fall inside the thresholds, pages open on a phone, every page has a title and a description, analytics records an enquiry. Everything else is a discussion of taste rather than acceptance.
Source files and account handover: how a project actually ends
A project ends with a handover, not with a launch. The full list is short: design source files, the code repository, hosting and control panel access, the domain registrar account, the mail administrator, analytics properties, a CMS administrator account and instructions for routine updates.
If even one of those stays only with the contractor, you do not own the site; you use it. Under a deliberate service agreement that is fine. It is not fine when it is discovered by accident, at the moment you need to change supplier quickly or update a page and the access is not yours.
Handover takes time, so it should either be paid for or written into the scope. A line reading transfer of source files and accounts is inexpensive and saves weeks of correspondence. Good practice is to accept it as a separate document listing the accounts transferred and confirming that every login works.
Making scope contractual and what to ask before signing
Contractual scope is not a thick document. It is three short lists: what is included, what is excluded, and what the client will deliver and by when. The third list matters most, because it is the one that slips: copy, photographs, company details, legal information and structural decisions almost always sit on the client's side.
The questions before signing are short. Whose name is the domain in and who pays for the first year? How many pages of copy are included and who writes them? Is a shoot included and who holds the image rights? Who prepares the legal pages? What exactly is configured in analytics? What is handed over at closing?
VITON13 is a design and development studio based in Saint Petersburg working remotely worldwide, and part of our work runs with AI under human direction in the $13–$113 range. No figure means anything without the list of lines it covers. The list first, then the number: in that order the conversation stays short.
Practical checklist
- Ask for the quote as three lists: included, excluded, client-supplied.
- Confirm whose name the domain is in and who pays for the first year.
- Establish how many pages of copy are included and who writes them.
- Agree image rights and how long the photographs may be used.
- Add legal pages and analytics configuration as their own quote lines.
- Accept the handover of accounts and source files as a separate document.
Questions and answers
What does a turnkey website proposal usually include?
Typically design and build of an agreed number of pages, responsive layouts, basic form setup, population with material the client supplies, and publication. Everything beyond that depends on the specific quote, so the only reliable way to know the scope is to read the line items rather than the phrase itself.
Which items most often fall outside the quote?
Copy and editing, photography and image rights, domain registration, hosting, business mail, analytics and goal configuration, legal pages, translation into other languages, and the handover of source files and accounts. Each line is small on its own, but together they add up to a second budget.
Whose name should the domain and hosting be in?
The client company's. A domain is a registration for a term that has to be renewed, and it belongs to whoever it is registered to. If the domain and hosting sit with the contractor, you use your own address on someone else's terms, and migrating a year later costs more than registering it correctly on day one.
How do you check site speed at acceptance?
With measurable thresholds instead of impressions. Google's web.dev describes three Core Web Vitals — LCP, INP and CLS — with thresholds of 2.5 seconds, 200 milliseconds and 0.1, assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads. Those values can be written into a contract and verified on named pages.
What has to be handed over when the project closes?
Design source files, the code repository, hosting and control panel access, the domain registrar account, the mail administrator, analytics properties, a CMS administrator account and short instructions for routine updates. It is easiest to accept the handover as a separate document listing every account transferred.