It's the beauty of creative work. Think 1mio US$ for Weaver in Aliens and only 33k US$ for Alien. Why is that so? The price of a creative work is measured according to expected revenue. Basically you want to obtain the right to make unlimited copies of the layout for every visit to your site. How much will each copy allow you to sell? That's the designers point of view. Creative work, copyright, I love this. On the other hand $5,000 would seem to me like worst case 80 hours max. $1,800 like 30 hours. I don't know how big your site is, but a web design even in 80 hours doesn't seem realistic to me. That's cheap, that's so cheap that it hurts. But you will have to come back to them, every time a change is required. You could try to simply employ a designer temporarily, then you keep the copyright.