Auto repair shop website pricing is one of the murkiest corners of local-business marketing. The franchise-adjacent agencies quote $4,000 to $8,000 for a Wix template with stock mechanic photos, then $1,200 a month for 'SEO and content' that turns out to be one blog post and a status report. The local guy quotes $800 and disappears for six months. Neither of those is what we do. Here's the full menu, with the auto repair flex on every line.
The four build tiers
Site, $2,500
Up to eight pages, 100% original copy, foundational answer engine optimization (AEO) setup including AutoRepair schema, OpeningHoursSpecification, and FAQPage on the service pages. The starter for a one-bay generalist shop that needs the basics working before next quarter. Typically the homepage, the about page, three core service pages (brakes, oil change, alignment is a common starter set), one make page if there's a clear lead make (we see this often with import specialists), and a contact page wired to a tap-to-call sticky bar.
Story, $5,000
Up to fifteen pages plus the audio/video pipelines (Loom-to-blog, podcast-to-article, voice memo-to-FAQ). The right tier for a specialist shop covering two or three makes plus a tight service menu of six to eight services. The voice memo pipeline is the one shop owners actually use, because they can record a two-minute explanation of why a Subaru head gasket job costs what it does on the drive home, and we turn it into a service page that ranks. Most shops we'd recommend start here.
Engine, $9,000
Up to 200 programmatic pages with structured data automation. This is the European specialist who fixes six makes, runs twenty service categories, and wants city pages across the Greater Toronto Area, the Lower Mainland, or the Calgary metro. The math is six makes times twenty services times ten cities, which gets to twelve hundred theoretical combinations. The architecture handles the relevant ones and prunes the rest. You don't need an Audi alignment page for a city you don't service. This is also the right answer for a tire chain with three or four locations or a transmission specialist running a city-wide territory.
Studio, $15,000 and up
Custom builds for the multi-location group, the franchise system, or the independent that wants an embedded booking flow with SMS quote acknowledgement and a customer portal showing job history. Usually only the right answer when there are three or more locations, a fleet contract behind the work, or a buildable feature (financing calculator, tire size lookup, OBD code reference) that becomes its own programmatic surface.
The four retainers
Care, $60/mo
Cite-met hosting, llms.txt and schema maintenance, monthly AI-traffic tracking. This is the floor. If you're paying anyone more than this for hosting and not getting the schema work and the AI-traffic tracking, you're paying too much. See the full menu.
Local, $300/mo
Care plus one SEO blog post a month, local schema and Google Business Profile sync. Right for a single-bay shop that wants steady content but isn't running a multi-make program.
Growth, $700/mo
Local plus four posts a month, brand-mention tracking across the AI engines, and light link building. Right for the European specialist running a multi-make site who wants to stay cited as new model years and new failure modes show up in the search queries.
Authority, $2,000 and up/mo
Growth plus Reddit and Wikipedia seeding, digital PR, and original research. The right answer for a regional chain or a specialist trying to own a category at the city or province level.
But what about the agency quoting me $1,200 a month for SEO
This is the question we hear most. The franchise-adjacent agencies bundle hosting, one or two posts, and a 'report' into a $1,200 to $1,800 monthly retainer. The work that actually moves the citation needle (structured data, per-make pages, llms.txt, FAQPage markup, AI engine monitoring) is usually not in scope or is sold as a $300 to $500 add-on. When you stack our Growth retainer at $700 against a $1,400 a month retainer, the gap is real and the deliverables are itemized on the audit. We don't want you to take our word for it, we want you to get the audit and see the comparison line by line.
The rule of the house
We quote under what you're paying now, the audit is free, and the comparison is itemized against your current bill. If we can't beat what you're paying on price and ship more deliverable on top, we'll tell you on the call, which has happened maybe three times in the history of the studio. The auto repair vertical hasn't been one of them yet. Book the audit and we'll show you the per-make page plan and the line-item comparison before you commit to anything.