Most Canadian law firms we audit are paying somewhere between $1,200 and $1,800 a month to an SEO agency, on a site that was built three to five years ago, without LegalService schema, without an llms.txt, and without FAQPage markup on the practice-area pages. The build was usually $4,000 to $8,000 at the time. The annual spend is therefore somewhere around $20,000 to $24,000, and the deliverable is mostly opaque content updates and link-building reports that the managing partner does not have time to read.
We sell a one-time build plus a much lower monthly retainer. The numbers below are fixed and public.
The four build tiers
Site, $2,500
Up to eight pages, 100% original copy, foundational AEO setup. For a law firm this usually shapes up as: homepage, three practice-area pages, one or two lawyer profile pages, an about page, and a contact page. LegalService schema on the practice pages, FAQPage schema on the FAQ blocks, llms.txt at the root, and a law-society-advertising-rule check on every line before publication. This is the right tier for a solo practitioner or a two-lawyer firm.
Story, $5,000
Up to fifteen pages, plus audio/video content pipelines. The extra room covers six practice-area pages, four to six lawyer profile pages, an about page, a careers page, and a starter content layer. The Loom-to-blog pipeline means a partner can record a five-minute explainer on, say, custody arrangements under the Divorce Act, and the studio turns it into a properly schema-d article without anyone having to write it from scratch. The right tier for a small but multi-practice firm.
Engine, $9,000
Up to 200+ programmatic pages with structured data automation. For a multi-practice firm this becomes per-practice-area pages crossed with per-city pages crossed with per-lawyer pages, all generated from a single content source and all schema-consistent. A firm with seven practice areas serving five Ontario cities can have 35 city-by-practice combinations, plus the lawyer profiles, plus the article layer, all in the same site. The right tier for a regional firm with multiple offices.
Studio, $15,000+
Custom apps, multi-domain rollouts, embedded conversational layers. For lawyers this is where the booking widget integration (Clio Grow, Bookafy, or the firm's chosen vendor) gets embedded into the practice-area pages, where the intake automation gets built, and where multilingual layers get fully integrated. The right tier for a regional or national firm that wants the site to behave like a product.
The four retainer tiers
Care, $60/mo
Cite-met hosting, llms.txt and schema maintenance, monthly AI-traffic tracking. The floor. The site stays alive, the schema stays valid, and the firm sees a monthly report on which AI crawlers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the rest) are visiting it across six engines.
Local, $300/mo
Care plus one SEO post per month, plus Google Business Profile, plus local citations, plus on-page work. For a single-city firm with one or two practice areas this is usually enough.
Growth, $700/mo
Local plus four posts per month, plus off-page link building, plus competitor share-of-voice tracking, plus a monthly strategist. For a multi-practice firm in a competitive city (Toronto family law, Vancouver personal injury) this is the common tier.
Authority, $2,000+/mo
Growth plus AEO citation-building, plus Reddit and Wikipedia seeding, plus digital PR, plus original research. The tier for a firm that wants to own the conversation on a specific practice area in a specific province, not just rank for it.
What about the $1,400/mo agency the firm is using now?
The math usually works out like this. Current agency: $1,400/mo x 12 = $16,800/yr, with no AEO setup, no LegalService schema depth, no llms.txt, no Cite-met AI-traffic tracking. Our model for the same firm: $5,000 one-time Story build + $300/mo Local = $8,600 in year one and $3,600/yr after that, with all of the above included. The firm is at break-even inside fifteen months and saving roughly $13,000/yr after that. The savings tend to climb in year two and three as the AEO compounds.
The rule of the house
We do not quote above what the firm is paying now. If a Toronto family law firm is paying $1,200/mo, the Local quote at $300/mo is the right comparison. If a Vancouver personal injury firm is paying $1,800/mo, the Growth quote at $700/mo is the right comparison. The build is one-time and the retainer is monthly, and both numbers are published on the solutions page so there is nothing to negotiate over.
Other compliance-aware professional service buyers, like accountants and dentists, sit on the same math. The pattern holds across regulated industries. Run the free audit and the studio will send the firm a one-page report on what its current site is missing and what the rebuild would cost, with no deck and no sales call required. The portfolio shows the build instinct on home-builder and AV-installer sites that the studio has shipped, and the law firm version of that work follows the same model.