What a contractor website actually costs in 2026
Between $0 and $10,000 to put up, and between $16 and $2,500 a month to keep. That spread is not a dodge — it is five genuinely different purchases, and the monthly number is the one that decides which you are making.
Every option below is priced, including the four we do not sell.
Last reviewed 2026-08-10 · every price and score on this page is checkable
Every option, priced
Five ways to get a website, and what each one really costs
| Option | Upfront | Ongoing | The trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY template builder | $0 | $16–$49/mo | Every hour of building and every future edit is yours, at night, after a full day of work. |
| Freelancer on a marketplace | $500–$3,000 | $0, plus hosting | Delivered and gone. Edits are a new negotiation each time, if the freelancer is still reachable. |
| Local agency retainer | $3,000–$10,000 | $500–$2,500/mo | The retainer buys a queue. Your request reaches an account manager, who forwards it to a developer billing against an hour bucket. |
| Agency reselling a funnel platform | $0–$1,500 | $300–$1,500/mo | You are renting pages you cannot take with you, usually on a login the agency controls. |
| JuicedWebsites | $750–$2,500 | $500/mo | Capacity is 5 builds a month and the studio is one person, so there is a queue to get in — just not a queue once you are in. |
US pricing, reviewed 2026-08-10. The JuicedWebsites row is our published price and is what appears on the quote. The other four are the ranges contractors report paying, and any specific quote you hold beats a range on a web page.
Ask before you compare
Four line items that change the number after you sign
Two quotes are not comparable until you know which of these apply to each. Ask all four out loud, of everyone, including us.
01
Hosting billed separately
$15 to $100 a month that was not in the build quote, sometimes invoiced by a third party you have never spoken to.
02
Theme and plugin licences
Renew annually. A form plugin, a booking plugin, a gallery plugin and a security plugin is a few hundred a year before anyone touches the site.
03
Hourly edits
The retainer covers a bucket of hours. A price change in week three of a full month is billed, or it waits until next month.
04
The rebuild in year three
The builder deprecated the editor, or the theme stopped being maintained. The quote you compared in year one did not include doing it again.
Our answers, for the record: hosting is in the $500, there are no licences because there is no theme and no plugin stack, minor edits are unlimited and never billed hourly, and there is no rebuild cycle because the code is written rather than generated by a builder that can deprecate.
The only math that matters
Count it in jobs, and count margin
A $500 monthly is $6,000 a year. If a typical job clears $2,000 in margin, the site has to produce three jobs a year to break even and everything past the third is profit.
Count margin, not revenue. A $12,000 roof is not $12,000 in your pocket and you know that better than any web studio does.
Run the same math on the template. $49 a month is $588 a year, so it needs one job every couple of years. That is a much easier bar and it is why the template is genuinely the right answer for a lot of contractors.
The question is not which is cheaper. It is which one is going to produce the third job.
5 builds a month. That is one person's real limit, not a countdown.
Questions people actually ask
Prices, without the discovery call first
How much does a contractor website cost?
In the United States in 2026, a contractor website costs roughly $0 to $3,000 to put up and $16 to $2,500 a month to keep. DIY template builders sit at the bottom, freelancers in the middle at $500 to $3,000 once, and agency retainers at the top with $3,000 to $10,000 upfront.
Why do website prices vary so much?
Price tracks who does the work after launch, not how the site looks at launch. A $49-a-month template means you make every future change yourself. A $2,000-a-month retainer is mostly buying someone else's time to make them. The build itself is the smaller half of the number.
How much should a contractor spend on a website?
A useful test: one signed job should cover several months of the site. If a typical job clears $2,000 in margin, a $500-a-month site needs to produce about three jobs a year to pay for itself. Below that threshold the honest answer is a template, not a custom build.
Are there hidden costs in a contractor website?
Usually four: hosting billed separately, plugin or theme licences renewing annually, an hourly rate for edits the retainer did not cover, and a rebuild in three years because the platform changed. Ask any quote which of those four apply before comparing it to another quote.
Order your site
No call, no quote, no proposal.
$1,000 covers the build and the first 3 months. Pay, fill in one form, and it's booked against this month's capacity. Bigger job than that? Text your trade and towns and we'll quote it by hand.
You own the site from day one. The monthly cancels any month.
Or text us — bigger job, or a question first.Or call the same number and talk it through.No discovery call. No calendar link. No sales pipeline.