Guide
What should a trades website
actually cost?
Quotes for the same job run from nothing to fifteen thousand dollars, which tells you the price isn't really about the website. Here's what you're being charged for in each case, and which parts you'd miss.
The four things you'll be quoted
Same website. Four prices.
Build it yourself — $20 to $40 a month
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy's builder. The software is fine. The cost isn't the subscription, it's the two or three evenings you spend on it and the fact that it's never quite finished. Most trades I speak to have one of these, built eighteen months ago, with a service on it they stopped offering and a phone number that isn't tappable.
It also does exactly one thing: it exists. Nobody is watching whether it's found, nobody answers the inquiries it collects, and nobody asks your customers for a review.
A freelancer, one-off — $1,500 to $5,000
You get a proper website and you own it. That's a real thing and it's worth something.
What happens next is the problem. The invoice is paid, the relationship ends, and the website starts going stale the same week. Six months later you want a price changed and you're emailing someone who has moved on to other work. Two years later it needs updating and you're starting again, because the person who built it used tools only they understand.
An agency, monthly — $2,500 to $15,000 up front, then $500 to $2,000 a month
You get a good website, a strategist, a project manager, and a monthly report. The report is the tell. Ask what changed on your phone this month and you'll usually get impressions and sessions rather than calls and jobs.
Agencies aren't a rip-off. They're built for businesses with a marketing budget and someone internal to manage them. If that's not you, you're paying for a layer of people who exist to manage other people.
"Free" — and this is the expensive one
Directory websites and lead-generation companies will build you a website for nothing. You don't own it, it lives on their domain, and the reviews and rankings it earns belong to them. Stop paying and it disappears, along with everything it built up.
Some of them then sell you the leads it generates. You're paying to rent an audience you already earned.
The number nobody quotes
The website isn't the expensive part.
Here's the thing that makes all of the above beside the point. A website's job is to turn someone looking for your trade into a phone call. Everything after that call is where the money actually is — and it's the part nobody includes.
411 Locals found that only 37.8% of calls to small businesses are answered by a live person. Of the callers who don't reach anyone, roughly 85% never call back, and 62% ring a competitor instead.
411 Locals (2024), study of inbound calls to small businesses across North America.
Run that against your own week. If you miss five calls, four of them are gone, and three of those four just gave the job to whoever answered next. At an average job of $400, that's $1,200 in a week that never appears in any report, because a call you didn't take doesn't leave a trace.
A $5,000 website that doesn't fix that is more expensive than a $200 one that does. That's the actual comparison, and it's why the price of the website is close to irrelevant on its own.
Before you sign anything
Six questions worth asking.
Whoever you end up with — me or anyone else — these are the ones that separate a website from a system that books jobs.
- Do I own the domain and the website? If the answer is complicated, walk.
- What happens when someone calls and I'm on the tools? If the answer is "voicemail", the website has done its job and the business hasn't.
- Who manages my Google Business Profile? For a local trade, that listing gets more calls than the website does.
- How do reviews get asked for? If it's "we'll remind you", it won't happen. If it's "we'll filter out the bad ones", that's against Google's policy and it's your listing at risk, not theirs.
- What does a change cost, in two years? Per-change fees are how a cheap build becomes an expensive one.
- Is there a contract, and how do I leave? Ask before you're trying to.
What I charge
One monthly price, and I build it first.
Since it would be odd to write all that and not answer it: I charge one monthly price with no setup fee and no contract, and it covers the website, the Google Business Profile, the missed-call text-back, the review requests, the booking, the inbox and a business number. The figure is on the pricing section, and everything in it is listed on the what's included page.
The part that matters more than the number: I build your website before you pay anything. You look at it on your own phone and decide then. That's not a trial with a card on file — there's nothing to cancel if you say no.
What I do about it
See your website
before you pay a cent.
I build the website first, you look at it, and you decide after. No setup fee, no contract, and nothing to cancel if you'd rather not.
Or call (888) 240-2477. If you'd rather start with your current website, the free website audit takes about thirty seconds.