What a website actually costs for a home service business
Expect $0 to $50 a month if you build it yourself, $1,500 to $5,000 one time for a freelancer, $3,000 to $10,000 or more for a local agency, and $100 to $300 a month for a done-for-you service. But the build price is the smallest number in this decision. What a site costs you is set by your own hours going into it and by how many visitors it turns into quote requests.
Almost nobody in this industry publishes prices. You call, you sit through a discovery process, and a number arrives at the end shaped by what the agency thinks you can pay. That is not an accident, and it is the reason so many contractors have no idea whether $4,000 is a fair price or a fleecing.
So here are real numbers, including ours.
The five ways to get a website
Do it yourself on a builder
Roughly $16 to $50 a month, plus your time.
Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy all sell a drag-and-drop editor with templates. The monthly fee covers hosting and usually your domain for the first year.
The sticker price is honest. The cost that is not on the pricing page is your weekend. Expect somewhere between ten and forty hours to get from a blank template to something you are willing to put on a truck, and that assumes you already have photos and know what you want each page to say. Most contractors get about seventy percent of the way there and then stall for a year on the part where you have to write about yourself.
Worth it if: you have more time than money, you are comfortable fiddling with software, and you genuinely will finish it.
Hire a freelancer
$1,500 to $5,000 one time, sometimes plus a small monthly fee.
A freelancer builds you something custom, or more often customizes a template. Quality swings enormously. At the low end you are getting a lightly rearranged theme. At the high end you are getting real design work from somebody who has built for contractors before and knows what a quote form should ask.
The risk is what happens after launch. Freelancers move on, take full-time jobs, and stop answering email. If your site needs a phone number changed in eighteen months and the person who built it has vanished, you are paying somebody new to learn your site before they can touch it.
Ask before you hire: who hosts it, who owns the domain, and what a small edit costs next year.
Hire a local agency
$3,000 to $10,000 or more up front, then $50 to $200 a month.
You get a process. Discovery, mockups, revision rounds, a launch plan, and a real person to call. For a business doing a few million a year with a marketing budget, this is often the right call.
Two things to watch. First, revision rounds are where budgets die, because most contracts include two or three and bill hourly after that. Second, ask whether the monthly is hosting or a retainer, because those are wildly different things sold with the same word.
The free website from a lead company
$0 up front, then $200 to $600 a month, and you do not own it.
Several national companies will build you a site for nothing and bundle it with a lead generation program. The site is free because it is not really yours. It usually lives on their platform, on a domain they control, and it exists to feed their system.
The catch shows up when you leave. You cannot take the site, you often cannot take the domain, and any rankings that domain earned stay with them. Three years of paying to build up an asset you do not own.
If you consider one of these, ask one question in writing: if I cancel, do I keep the domain and the site? The answer tells you what you are actually buying.
A done-for-you service
$0 to $1,500 to launch, then $100 to $300 a month.
Somebody else builds and runs it, and the monthly covers hosting, domain, security, and small changes. Less bespoke than an agency, far less work than DIY.
This is what we do, so read the next part knowing that.
What we charge
Essentials is $499 to launch and $149 a month, covering sites up to five pages, which is the right answer for most home service companies. Expanded starts at $1,499 to launch and $249 a month, for businesses that need a page per service, a page per town, or a blog. Both are on our pricing page with the details.
We build the whole site before you pay anything and send you the link. If it is not obviously better than what you have, you walk away and it costs you nothing. We put the price in public because we would rather lose the wrong customer on a web page than on a phone call.
The sticker price is not the price
Here is what these look like over three years counting cash only.
| Up front | Monthly | Three-year cash | |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | $0 | $30 | $1,080 |
| Freelancer | $3,000 | $25 hosting | $3,900 |
| Local agency | $6,000 | $100 | $9,600 |
| Free site from a lead company | $0 | $400 | $14,400 |
| Essentials | $499 | $149 | $5,863 |
Read that table and DIY wins easily. It is also the wrong table, because two of the largest costs are missing from it.
Cost one: your hours are not free
Building it yourself is not $1,080. It is $1,080 plus every hour you spend.
Call it 25 hours to get from a blank template to something you would put on a truck. That is the honest middle of the range, assuming you already have photos and know what each page should say. Then budget another half hour a month forever for edits, because every change is now yours: new number, new hours, a service added, a photo swapped.
Price your own time at what you actually bill, or at what an hour of quoting work is worth to you. Most contractors land somewhere between $60 and $120.
| DIY, counted properly | |
|---|---|
| Software, 3 years | $1,080 |
| Build time, 25 hrs at $85 | $2,125 |
| Edits, 18 hrs at $85 | $1,530 |
| Real three-year cost | $4,735 |
Against $5,863 for a done-for-you plan where none of those hours are yours. The gap was never $4,800. It is closer to a thousand dollars over three years, and it assumes you finish.
Most people do not finish. The site sits at seventy percent with a placeholder about page for a year. A half-built website costs you the software fee plus all the hours plus everything it never earned.
Cost two: a site that does not convert
This is the one that makes the rest of the arithmetic look like rounding.
Your website has one job: turn a visitor into a phone call or a quote request. The share who do is your conversion rate, and the difference between a good site and a bad one at the same price is enormous.
Run your own numbers. Say 200 people find you in a month.
| Weak site | Site built to convert | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly visitors | 200 | 200 |
| Turn into quote requests | 2% (4) | 5% (10) |
| You win one in three | 1.3 jobs | 3.3 jobs |
| At $1,200 a job | $1,560/mo | $3,960/mo |
Same traffic, same town, same trade. A difference of roughly $2,400 a month, or $28,800 a year, decided entirely by how the site is built.
Put that next to the whole cost table. The gap between the cheapest and most expensive option over three years was about $13,000. One year of the conversion difference is more than twice that.
We are not going to pretend those percentages are yours specifically. Substitute your real traffic, your real close rate and your real average job, and the shape of the answer does not change: what the site earns dwarfs what it costs.
So what actually makes a site convert
Nothing exotic, which is why it is frustrating that so many sites miss it:
- It loads before they leave. Your customer is on a phone in a driveway. Seconds matter, and every extra second costs you some of them.
- Your number is tappable on every screen. A large share of home service customers would rather call than type.
- Proof shows up before the pitch. Real photos of real jobs and real reviews, above the fold.
- The form is short. Every extra field costs you submissions. Name, number, what they need.
- It answers the price question. Silence on price does not create curiosity, it creates a click to your competitor.
None of that requires a big budget. It requires somebody deciding it matters. A template you filled in yourself over three weekends usually gets none of it, not because you did anything wrong, but because you were solving “get a website up” rather than “get more calls”.
If you want to know where your current site stands, there is a ten minute test you can run on your own phone.
The number that actually matters
Not the build fee. Cost per booked job.
A $6,000 site that brings in two extra jobs a month is the cheapest thing you have ever bought. A free site that brings in none is infinitely expensive, because you paid something and got nothing back.
That is why we put our price in public and then build the whole thing before charging for it. If the finished site is not obviously better than what you have, the price is irrelevant and you should walk away.
Where the hidden costs are
Edits. Ask what a small change costs. Some agencies bill $95 an hour with a one-hour minimum to change your hours. Over a few years that quietly outgrows the build fee.
Domain ownership. Your domain should be registered to you, not to your web company. This is the single most common way contractors get held hostage, and it is invisible until you try to leave.
Rebuilds. A cheap site you replace in two years cost you the cheap price plus the replacement plus the traffic you lost in between.
Lock-in. If leaving means starting over, the price is whatever they decide to raise it to. Ask what you take with you.
What actually decides the price
Not page count. Three things:
-
Whether somebody writes it. Copy is most of the work. Sites that come in cheap are usually cheap because you are writing them, which is why so many sit half finished.
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Whether it is built for phones first. Most of your customers are on a phone in a driveway. A site that merely shrinks on mobile is a cheaper build and a worse business.
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Whether it is assembled or built. A template dropped onto a builder is quick and cheap, and it carries that platform’s weight to every visitor’s phone forever. A hand-built site costs more to produce and loads faster for as long as it exists. We build in code for exactly this reason, and it is the clearest thing you will notice comparing a finished site of ours against the one you have.
-
Who fixes it later. A price with nobody attached to it afterward is not a lower price, it is a deferred one.
A straight recommendation
If you genuinely have the time and will finish it, build it on Squarespace. Not because it is cheaper, since once your hours are counted it roughly is not, but because you will understand your own site and can change it at midnight. That is worth something real. Be honest with yourself about the “will finish it” part, though. Most do not.
If you are big enough to have a marketing budget and want strategy rather than a website, hire the local agency and hold them to the conversion numbers above.
Whatever you do, do not take the free site from the lead company. Three years of payments building an asset somebody else owns.
If your time is worth more than $60 an hour and you would rather it went into jobs, a done-for-you service is the honest fit, ours or somebody else’s. The hours are the whole argument. Twenty-five of yours, plus the ones you keep spending on edits, against none.
Here is our specific case, and you do not have to decide anything to test it. We research your business, pull your real Google reviews, write the copy, and hand-build the finished site. Then we send you the link. No deposit, no meeting, no mockups. You open your actual website and judge it against what you have now.
Run it against the only test that matters. Open your current site on your phone and count the seconds before it loads. See how many taps it takes to reach your phone number. Then do the same on the one we build. If it is not obviously better, walk away and it has cost you nothing but ten minutes.