Nobody publishes prices in this industry and it drives me crazy. Every site says “contact us for a quote,” which means you have to sit through a sales call before you can find out if you can afford the thing.
So here are real numbers, including my competitors’, including where I’d tell you not to hire me.
The four tiers, honestly
Free to $30 a month. Do it yourself.
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. A weekend of your time, and it’ll look like a template because it is one. Slow, you can’t export it, and the SEO groundwork won’t be there unless you go learn how to do it.
Worth it when your budget is genuinely zero. A site that exists beats one you can’t afford.
$300 to $1,200. Solo builder or small local shop.
This is where I sit, along with a handful of other independents. You’re hiring a person, not a company. Quality swings enormously depending on who that person is, so look at their actual work and ask to talk to somebody they built for.
$3,000 to $8,000. Local agency.
A team. Project manager, designer, developer, sometimes a copywriter. Four to eight weeks. Most of what you’re paying for is coordination between those people, plus the overhead of an office and a sales process.
You get real strategy work, a proper discovery process, and somebody to call who isn’t the person building it. If you have complex needs or you need multiple stakeholders managed, that’s genuinely worth something.
$15,000 and up. Full agency.
Custom photography, brand strategy, extensive research. This is not for a local plumbing company and anybody selling it to one is taking advantage.
What I charge
$399, one page. Everything a local business needs on a single scroll. Offer, services, reviews, photos, tappable phone, working form, sticky mobile call bar. Five days.
$950, up to five pages. Custom design to your brand, service pages, gallery, complete SEO markup and schema, Google Business Profile setup, analytics with real conversion tracking, copywriting included. Seven days.
$1,850, up to ten pages. Service area pages per city, booking integration, blog system, advanced local SEO, logo refresh. Ten to fourteen days.
Flat fee, paid once. Hosting setup, SSL, and full file ownership included in all three. No monthly fee attached to the website.
The one page is $399 through the end of October, then it goes to $950. That’s not a fake deadline, it’s that I’m building a portfolio of live local work and pricing accordingly until I have it.
What the monthly stuff actually costs
Separate from the build, and this is where the industry gets slippery.
Domain, $12 to $20 a year. In your name. Always.
Hosting, $0 to $20 a month. Static sites like mine host free on Netlify. If somebody’s charging you $40 a month for hosting a five page site, that’s not hosting, that’s a subscription with a hosting label on it.
Google Business Profile management, $200 to $500 a month. Mine’s $299. Profile optimization, weekly posts, review generation, photo uploads, monthly rank reporting. This is real ongoing work, not a maintenance fee, and it’s cancelable any month.
“Website maintenance,” $50 to $200 a month. Ask hard what this includes. On a static site it’s usually nothing. On WordPress it’s plugin updates and security patching, which is real, and is also a decent argument for not using WordPress.
The number that matters more than the price
What’s a customer worth to you?
A plumbing job averages a few hundred dollars. An HVAC install is thousands. A remodel is tens of thousands. A salon client is a few hundred a year, for years.
Run it. If a website brings you two extra jobs, does it pay for itself?
For most trades the answer is that one job covers the entire build. For a remodeler, one job covers it several times over. That reframes the whole question from “can I afford $950” to “can I afford another year of not being findable.”
When you shouldn’t spend anything
Genuinely:
- If your Google listing is a mess, fix that first. It’s free and it matters more. A great website attached to a neglected listing is a showroom on a road nobody drives down.
- If you have all the work you can handle. Some businesses are booked out and referral fed and a website is a vanity purchase. Save the money.
- If your current site is fine. Sometimes I look at one and the answer is three small fixes, not a rebuild. That’s happened and I’ve said so.
The free part
Send me your URL, or just your business name if you don’t have a site. I’ll tell you where you currently rank across the city, what’s broken, and what I’d fix first.
No meeting, no pitch, no follow up sequence. If the answer is “don’t spend money on this right now,” you’ll get that answer.
