Every agency calls their work bespoke. It's become one of those words that gets said so often it barely means anything, so it's worth being specific: bespoke web development is software built around how your business actually operates, rather than your business adjusting itself to fit whatever a template allows.
When off-the-shelf is genuinely the better choice
For most businesses this is the right call, not a compromise. If your website's job is to look professional and collect enquiries through a standard form, paying for custom development would be solving a problem you don't have. Template tools exist because they're good at exactly that.
Where templates start fighting you
The trouble starts once your business needs something the template wasn't built for: a booking system that understands your real availability, a customer portal, a quote calculator, some link between your website and the software you already run day to day. At that point you're either paying someone to force a workaround onto a platform that resists it, or your team is quietly losing time to that workaround every week without anyone adding it up.
A decent rule of thumb: if a plugin already does roughly what you need, use the plugin. It's when you're stacking two or three of them together and still not getting the exact workflow your business needs that custom development starts to look less like an indulgence and more like the cheaper option long-term.
The upfront cost of a custom build is real, and it's fair to hesitate over it. But for a business whose website needs to actually run part of the operation, not just describe it, bespoke development usually pays for itself faster than people expect.