What a contractor website should cost
A custom website for a small service business runs $750 to $2,500 to build and $99 to $500 a month to keep. Below $750 you are buying a template. Above $6,000 you are buying an agency’s overhead.
The build is $750 to $2,500, quoted in writing before work starts, and $500 a month after. The rest of this page is how those numbers are put together, so you can check anyone’s quote and not just mine.
The five things you will be quoted
Every option, with the catch stated
| Option | Upfront | Monthly | What it really means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself on a builder | $0 | $16–$49 | Cheapest on paper. The cost is the forty hours you spend on it and a site that loads a theme before it loads your phone number. |
| Template shop, trade-specific | $0–$1,500 | $99–$299 | Fast to launch because it is the same site as everyone else in your trade. Edits go into a queue and the design is not yours. |
| Freelancer, one-off build | $1,500–$6,000 | $0 | You own a good site and nobody maintains it. Two years later it is unpatched and the person who built it has a full-time job. |
| Full-service agency | $5,000–$25,000 | $500–$3,000 | Real strategy and real reporting. Also an account manager, a queue, and a monthly hour bucket your small edits get billed against. |
| What we charge | $750–$2,500 | $500 | One person, no queue. Any minor change is live within 4 hours, month to month, and you own the site whether you stay or not. |
Ranges are what a small service business is commonly quoted in 2026. Yours will land inside them or someone is charging for something they have not explained yet.
The only math that matters
Count it in jobs, not dollars
Forget what a website “should” cost for a second. Take what one job clears you after materials, labor and the truck. Not the invoice — the margin.
If a job leaves you $1,200, the site pays for itself at one extra job every two and a half months. If it leaves you $400, it needs a bit more than one a month.
That is the entire decision. If the site cannot clear that bar, it should be cancelled, which is why the monthly is month to month with no exit fee.
Break-even, at $500/month
- $400 margin per job
- 1.3 jobs a month
- $800 margin per job
- 1 job every 1.6 months
- $1,200 margin per job
- 1 job every 2.5 months
- $3,000 margin per job
- 1 job every 6 months
Margin, not revenue. A $12,000 roof does not put $12,000 in your pocket, and you know that better than anyone.
Before you pay anyone
Five questions, including for me
Ask every one of these before a build fee leaves your account. The answers separate a $500 monthly that is worth it from one that is rent.
- 01
Who owns the site if you leave
If the answer is anything other than you, the monthly fee is rent. Ask for it in writing before you pay a build fee.
- 02
What a minor change costs and how long it takes
Get a number and a time window. Prices, hours, photos and text should be included and same-day, not billed at an hourly rate.
- 03
Whether hosting is separate
A $199 monthly that adds $35 hosting, $20 SSL and $15 backups is a $269 monthly. Ask for the all-in number.
- 04
What the site scores on Google Lighthouse today
Ask them to run it on a site they built and send the screenshot. Anyone who will not is telling you the answer.
- 05
How long the contract runs
Twelve-month terms exist to survive the month you stop seeing value. Month to month puts that risk back where it belongs.
Current offer
A custom site plus 3 months of getting found, for $1,000
One payment covers the build and the first 3 months of SEO and AI-search work. The same three months at the standard rate start at $2,250. After that it is the usual $500/month, cancel any month.
Bigger build than this? Text us instead.
Pricing
Here's the price. All of it.
Build
$750–$2,500one time
Most roofing and septic builds land between $1,200 and $1,800. You get the exact number by text before anything starts, and it doesn't move after that.
This range is quoted, not self-serve, because the price moves with your services and markets. Want to skip the quote and buy now instead? Order the $1,000 starter build — no call, checkout takes a form.
What you get
- A page for every service and every townSomebody searching “septic pumping” lands on your septic pumping page, not your homepage.
- Written for you, not filled in by youWritten for you off one 30-minute call. You approve it before it ships.
- A quote form that is four fieldsName, phone, address, what’s wrong. Every extra field costs you leads.
- Your Google reviews on the pageReal star rating, updating itself. Not a screenshot from 2019.
- Schema and AEO structure built inHours, service area and answers in the format Google and AI actually read.
- Live in a weekYou see it on a staging link first. Nothing goes public without your say.
What moves the price
- How many services you sell. A tree service with 4 services is cheaper than an HVAC company with 14.
- How many markets you want to rank in. 3 is a smaller build than 25.
- Whether you need photos shot or you already have them.
- Whether you're moving an old site over or starting clean.
The Cycle — $500/month
That's $6,000 a year. One roof is $12,000, and after materials and labor one extra job still covers it. Everything after that is yours.
What's in it
- Unlimited edits by textEvery one live within 4 hours on a business day. No ticket, no call.
- A new page whenever you add a service or a townWritten, built and indexed. Not a bullet added to an existing page.
- SEO for the markets you actually sell intoTargeted where your buyers are, not a national keyword report you will never read.
- AEO — getting named when someone asks AI for your tradeMeasured with aivisibilitymetrics.com, a tool we built, so you see whether it moved.
- Hosting, SSL, backups, uptime monitoringIf it goes down at 2 AM, we find out before you do.
- One short note a month, in plain EnglishWhat moved, what changed, what's next. No 40-page dashboard export.
Cancel any month, no notice and no exit fee. The site is yours either way — it moves to your own hosting account and the files are handed over. Nothing gets held hostage or shut off.
5 builds a month, and that's the cap. Not a countdown timer — it's how many one builder can do properly. When a month is full you get the next open date instead of being stacked up.
Text your trade and your towns — quoted the same dayCost questions
The ones that come in by text
How much should a contractor website cost?
For a small service business in 2026, expect $750 to $2,500 for a custom build and $99 to $500 a month to keep it hosted, maintained and updated. Under $750 you are almost certainly getting a template with your logo dropped in. Over $6,000 you are paying for an agency's overhead, which is worth it only if you need the strategy and reporting that comes with it. JuicedWebsites charges $750 to $2,500 to build and $500 a month after.
Why is there a monthly fee at all?
Hosting, SSL, monitoring, SEO work and edits are ongoing work, so they cost ongoing money. The question is not whether there is a monthly fee, it is what the fee buys. Mine covers unlimited minor changes shipped within 4 hours. A fee that only covers hosting should cost about $20, not $200.
Is $500 a month worth it for a small contractor?
Work it against one job, not against revenue. If your average job clears $1,200 of margin, the site has to bring in one job every two and a half months to pay for itself. If it cannot do that, cancel it — it is month to month for exactly this reason.
What should a website redesign cost?
A redesign is priced like a build, because it is one. Rebuilding a small service site runs $750 to $2,500 whether or not something already exists. Be careful of quotes that are cheap because they are keeping your old page structure — that is where the slow theme and the plugin stack live.
Are there setup fees, ad spend markups or upsells?
No. The build price is quoted by text before any work starts and does not move unless you ask for something outside the quote. Half up front, half at launch. No setup fee, no ad spend markup, and the monthly is one number.
Quoted in writing before work starts. No discovery call.
Want a flat price with no quote at all? The $1,000 home-services build orders instantly, no text needed.
Which one am I
Both paths build a marketing site. Pages are included; anything that takes a payment, logs someone in, remembers a visitor or works out an answer needs a quote. That is a quoted build either way, so it goes by text, never through the flat-price checkout.
A marketing site
- A page for every service you sell
- A page for every market you serve
- About, contact, and a gallery of your own work
- Your Google reviews on the page, live
- A lead form and click-to-call, built for a thumb
- Blog set up and ready, if you want one
- Schema, sitemap, and the AI-search structure
Quoted separately
- An online store
- Products, a cart, checkout, shipping — anything that takes a payment.
- Booking or scheduling
- Real availability, calendars, deposits. A contact form that asks for a preferred date is included; a system that holds a slot is not.
- Customer logins
- Accounts, portals, dashboards, anything behind a password.
- Instant quoting or calculators
- A tool that prices a job from what someone types in. It is arithmetic, but it is your pricing logic, and getting it wrong quotes a job you cannot do.
- Software you already run
- Wiring the site into a CRM, a field-service app, or a dispatch system.
- Anything with a database behind it
- If it remembers something about a visitor, it is a build, not a page.
Pricing by trade: RoofersPlumbersHVACElectriciansLandscapersPest controlTree serviceSeptic
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.