The prices we hear over and over: $800 to $1,500 a year for a template site on Wix or Squarespace, $200 to $500 a month to lease a site from a trades marketing company, $3,000 to $8,000 for a one-time custom build, and $15,000 to $40,000 for a full build with new branding on top. The spread is real and almost all of it comes down to what is included rather than how hard the work is.
The lease trap
Leasing a site from a trades marketing company feels cheap at $300 a month until you add it up: that is $3,600 a year, every year, and at the end of it you own nothing. Stop paying and the site goes away, including the pages that were finally starting to bring work in. A one-time build you own costs less by year two and keeps working after that.
What we charge
Build, one time
- Site at $2,500 covers up to 8 pages: home, about, contact, three main services, a gallery and reviews.
- Story at $5,000 covers up to 15 pages plus the writing and video setup, so job-site walkthroughs become posts.
- Engine at $9,000 builds 200+ pages: every service crossed with every town you cover, plus a page per model or subdivision.
- Studio at $15,000 and up covers several brands or divisions, or quote requests wired into your job management software.
Monthly, optional
- Care at $60/mo is hosting, upkeep and a monthly report on how people are finding you.
- Local at $300/mo adds a post a month, your Google Business Profile and local listings work.
- Growth at $700/mo adds four posts a month, work to get other sites linking to you, and tracking against rival firms.
- Authority at $2,000+/mo adds press and original research for firms who want to own their patch.
What about the $1,400 a month agency?
If you can look at the last three invoices and say what changed on your website because of them, keep them. Most of the firms who come to us cannot, and the honest comparison is that our Story build plus the $300 plan is $8,600 in year one and $3,600 a year after that, against $16,800 a year forever.
The rule of the house
The audit is free, the proposal lands in under two days, and Site or Story builds run two to four weeks. See Starlit Homes or Blackstone for the pattern.