Why most websites look expensive but feel cheap
Production value and perceived value are different currencies. Most budgets are spent on the first and judged on the second.
A company spends six figures on a website. The photography is commissioned. The animations are custom. The typography is licensed. And within four seconds a visitor decides it is not for them.
This happens constantly, and the diagnosis is almost always wrong. The site is not under-designed. It is over-produced and under-decided.
Production value is not perceived value
Production value is what the budget bought: the render quality, the asset count, the effect library. Perceived value is what the visitor concludes about the company in the first moments. They are different currencies and they do not convert cleanly.
A site can be enormously produced and read as cheap, because cheapness is not a measure of spend. It is a measure of confidence. Every element that exists because it could exist, rather than because it had to, reads as a decision the company was unable to make.
Restraint is expensive because it requires knowing what to remove, and removal is the part nobody can outsource.
The three tells
The first is competing focal points. When four things on a screen are shouting, the visitor concludes the company does not know which one matters. Hierarchy is an argument about importance; a flat page is a company that would not commit to one.
The second is generic imagery. A stock photograph of a handshake costs almost nothing and communicates almost nothing, but it does communicate one thing precisely: that the specific was not worth the effort.
The third is motion without meaning. An animation that exists to demonstrate that animation is possible reads as a portfolio piece for the agency, not a decision made for the client.
What actually reads as expensive
Space, consistently applied. One typeface used with conviction rather than three used defensively. Fewer elements, each of which had to earn its place. A single idea per screen, given room to land.
None of this is cheaper to make. It is harder, because every subtraction is a decision someone has to defend. That is exactly why it signals what it signals.
A website is not judged on what it contains. It is judged on what it was willing to leave out.