A real, painful story of what happens when you pick a web agency by price alone — and the 9 red flags every founder in Spain should screen for before signing.
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Last November a SaaS founder we'll call David called us in tears. Not metaphorically — actual tears. He had a demo with two early-stage VCs in eleven days, and the agency he'd hired in March to build his MVP had just stopped replying to emails.
We rebuilt his product in 9 days. He raised his pre-seed in January. But he had already paid €18,400 to the previous agency for something we eventually had to throw in the trash.
This is his story, told with his permission, because the lessons matter for every founder, every CMO, every SMB owner currently shopping for a web partner in Spain. The cheapest quote is almost never the cheapest project.
David had a clear scope. A B2B platform for restaurant inventory management. Three modules, integrations with Holded and a couple of POS systems, a freemium plan, Stripe for upgrades. Not crazy.
He got three quotes:
| Agency | Quote | Timeline | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency A (Madrid) | €34,000 | 14 weeks | Full-stack senior team |
| Agency B (Valencia) | €27,500 | 12 weeks | Senior team + 1 junior |
| Agency C (online) | €11,900 | 10 weeks | "Senior Spain team" |
He picked Agency C. Of course he did. He was 27, bootstrapping, every euro mattered. The salesperson on the call was friendly, the slides looked great, the testimonials on the website were glowing.
Eight months later he was paying us €19,500 to redo it from scratch.
Week 1–2. Kickoff call was great. Got mockups. They looked nice. Week 3. "Senior team" turned out to be one project manager based in Spain and a development team in a country David had never heard of. Communication started shifting to a 6-hour offset. Week 5. First demo. Half the features didn't work. The PM said "we're polishing it for next week." Week 7. First "small extra" — €1,200 — for "complex Stripe configuration that wasn't in the original scope." (It was.) Week 8–10. Slippage. Three more "small extras" totaling another €2,300. Week 12. Launch was promised. What got delivered was a Bootstrap-flavored UI nobody would pay for, a dashboard that loaded in 11 seconds, no error handling, and no Holded integration because "the API was harder than expected." Week 14. Another invoice for €2,000 to "finish what should have been done." Week 16. They asked for a final €1,000 to fix bugs they'd introduced in week 14. David refused. Week 17. They stopped replying.
Total invoiced: €18,400. Useful output: a hosting bill, a domain, and a half-built PostgreSQL schema.
David sent us the GitHub repo. We did an honest, line-by-line audit:
company_id, companyId, compny_id, comp_id, tenant_id, org, customer_company, customerOrg. No foreign keys.We told David honestly: this isn't fixable. Nothing here is salvageable. We have to start over.
David let us re-read the original proposal afterward. Knowing what we know now, here's what should have been screaming at him:
Each one alone is a pink flag. Stacked, they were a five-alarm fire.
Here's the math David did with us afterward, on a napkin:
The Madrid agency's quote, in retrospect, was the cheap one.
When founders ask us to compare them with another quote, we ask them to send the prospective vendor these six questions. The answers tell you everything in 48 hours.
Cheap agencies dodge at least four of these. Senior agencies have written answers, ready to send before you even finish typing the email.
We need to be honest. We are not always the right answer. We're a poor fit if:
But if you're a serious SMB or founder in Spain with a real product to ship, who refuses to redo this in 6 months because someone undercut by 40% — that's exactly the customer we're built for.
If you're holding a quote in your hand right now and your gut is whispering "too good to be true", let us read it for you. Free, in 48 hours, with concrete written feedback. We'll tell you what's missing, what's a red flag, and what a fair counter-offer looks like — even if you don't end up working with us.
Send us the quote — or see how we structure ours.
David's bakery-of-a-startup is now profitable, by the way. He still texts us screenshots of his MRR every Friday.