Quotes for the same job range from $500 to $30,000, and none of the numbers come with an explanation. Here's what you're actually paying for at each level.
Ask three companies to quote a website for your business and you'll get $800, $6,000 and $28,000. Nobody explains the gap. Here's the honest version.
Under about $1,000
At this level you're buying a template with your logo dropped on it, usually built fast by someone juggling a lot of jobs at once.
That is not automatically bad. If you have no site at all, something is better than nothing, and a tidy one-page site with your number on it will out-earn no website every day of the week.
What you're not getting: research into what your customers actually search for, structure built for the map pack, or anyone who answers the phone in eight months when you need the hours changed.
The $3,000 to $10,000 range
This is where most real small-business websites live. You should be getting a site designed around how you actually get work — a page per service, photos of your own jobs, a fast path to a phone call, and the technical groundwork that lets you rank at all.
The question to ask here is not about the build. It's about month four. Who updates it? What happens when a plugin breaks? Is hosting included or is that a separate bill you'll forget about? A cheap build with no support is often more expensive by the end of year one.
Above $15,000
Genuinely justified for e-commerce, custom functionality, booking systems tied to your software, or a brand that needs building from scratch.
It is not justified for a five-page site for a contractor, no matter how it's presented. If someone quotes that for a brochure site, ask exactly what the extra is buying.
Why we went monthly instead
We used to quote projects. We moved to flat monthly plans — $147 and $297 — for a reason worth explaining.
The project model has a bad incentive built into it. You get paid at launch, so launch is where the attention goes. Six months later, when the client needs a page changed, that's an interruption to the next project.
Monthly flips it. Hosting, updates, security and SEO are inside the price, so if a site goes stale that's our problem. It also means a business can start without finding several thousand dollars, which for a two-truck operation is often the whole barrier.
The trade-off, stated plainly: under a subscription we own the site and license it to you while it's active. If you want to own it outright, you can buy it out for a one-time sum we agree together. That's the honest exchange for the low entry price.
Three questions worth asking anyone
- What happens in month six? Who fixes things, and does it cost extra?
- Who owns what? The domain should be in your name from day one, no exceptions.
- What's not included? Ad spend, stock photos, domain renewal. Get the exclusions in writing.
Any decent shop will answer all three without flinching. The flinch is the information.