Most trade contractors land on our site because their current agency is charging somewhere between $800 and $2,400 a month and they can't point to a single ranking that moved. The first thing we do is publish the price, because if you can't see the number on the page, you're already in a negotiation we don't want to be in. The free audit tells you which tier actually fits, and the solutions page lays out the full ladder if you want to map it against your current spend.
The four build tiers, scoped for a contractor
Site, $2,500
Up to 8 pages, 100% original copy, foundational AEO setup. For a contractor that usually means: homepage, services overview, one service-area page, contact, plus the four sub-trade landing pages if you run plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and roofing under one roof. Basic LocalBusiness schema with the right sub-type (Plumber, Electrician, HVACBusiness, RoofingContractor). Click-to-call sticky bar on every page, because that's the conversion lever for this entire industry. The starter for a solo trade or a small shop that needs the site working before next quarter.
Story, $5,000
Up to 15 pages plus audio/video pipelines (Loom-to-blog, podcast-to-article). For trades that translates to per-sub-trade depth: 12 to 15 pages covering the jobs that actually drive your phone (furnace install, drain cleaning, panel upgrade, flat roof replacement, tankless water heater install, EV charger install). Plus the Loom pipeline so your foreman's two-minute job-site walkthrough becomes a 600-word indexable blog post with ImageObject schema on every shot.
Engine, $9,000
Up to 200+ programmatic pages with structured data automation. This is where the city by sub-trade matrix pays for itself. If you dispatch trucks to twenty cities and run four sub-trades, that's eighty pages right there, and each one gets Service, AvailableLanguage, and areaServed schema. We've covered the AI-citation logic behind this in the structured data guide for AI search.
Studio, $15,000+
Custom apps, multi-domain rollouts, embedded conversational layers. The right scope for a contractor running two or three brands (parent shop, emergency division, commercial arm), or one that wants a quote-estimator embedded in every service page. Most contractors don't need this. The ones who do tend to already know.
The four monthly retainers
Care, $60/mo
Cite-met hosting, llms.txt and schema maintenance, monthly AI-traffic tracking. The floor. Keeps the site on, keeps the schema fresh, keeps you in the AI citation flow. Most contractors who only need a site that doesn't break should sit here.
Local, $300/mo
Care plus 1 SEO post per month, local schema upkeep, Google Business Profile sync. This is the right starting retainer for a trade contractor with a working site that needs ongoing local visibility. The monthly post is usually a city-specific job recap or a sub-trade explainer ("how often should a Toronto homeowner replace their water heater"), and the GBP sync keeps the reviews flowing into Review schema.
Growth, $700/mo
Local plus 4 posts per month, brand-mention tracking, light link building. For the contractor who is actively trying to outrank a franchise on long-tail emergency queries across multiple cities. Four posts a month compounds into 48 a year, and at our pace that's enough new topic depth to move the AI citation needle in 90 to 180 days.
Authority, $2,000+/mo
Growth plus AEO citation-building, Reddit and Wikipedia seeding, digital PR, original research. Usually for a multi-location contractor or a franchise itself. Most independent trades don't get to this tier and shouldn't pretend they need to.
What about the $1,200/mo agency you're currently with?
The pattern we see most often: the contractor is paying somewhere between $900 and $1,600 a month for "SEO" that's really just three blog posts a month and some occasional GBP work. The site itself is on WordPress, loads in 5+ seconds on mobile, and has no per-service-area depth. The free audit will tell you whether what you're paying for is matching what's being shipped, and in most cases the answer is no.
The rule of the house: never sign a retainer that costs more than 30% of your build budget per year. If we ship you a $5,000 Story build, the retainer should be under $1,500/mo, which means Local at $300 or Growth at $700 covers most contractors. Anything higher is either an Authority situation or an agency margin problem.
The audit
The free audit is the actual deliverable here. Send us your current site and we'll come back with mobile speed, schema coverage, click-to-call placement, service-area depth, review wiring, and AI citation surface, all in a one-page summary. If we quote, the quote will be below what you're paying now. If we don't fit, we'll say so, and we'll point you at the agency that does. We've shipped for builders like custom home builders and direct-call service ICPs like auto shops, and the same scoping discipline applies here.