The honest price guide
How much does a contractor website cost?
Anywhere from $16 a month to $15,000 up front, and the price tag alone tells you almost nothing. Here is the whole market laid out plainly: what each tier really costs, what you actually get, and the questions to ask before money moves, whoever you hire.
| Option | Upfront | Ongoing | Pages | Built to be found? | You own it? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | $0 to $50/mo | $16 to $50 | As many as you build yourself | Rarely, without real SEO work | You rent the platform |
| Marketplace template | $300 to $800 | $0 to $30 hosting | Commonly 5 to 8 | Rarely; templates ship thin | Usually yes |
| Rent-a-site retainer | $0 to $500 | $99 to $400 | Commonly 5 to 15 | Sometimes | No. Cancel and the site is gone |
| The RankNext build | $3,500 one-time | $0 required (hosting ~$20-40 paid to providers you own) | 40+ keyword-optimized | Built for it: structure, schema, speed, launch SEO | Yes: domain, design, content, code |
| Custom agency build | $8,000 to $15,000+ | Often a retainer on top | Varies; SEO often an add-on | Often, eventually | Sometimes; hosting lock-in is common |
DIY builder: Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. The dollar cost is low; the real cost is your weekends and a site search engines have little reason to show. Fine when all you need is to exist somewhere.
Marketplace template: A Fiverr or Upwork freelancer drops your logo and photos into a theme. It can look fine. It answers few of the questions your customers actually search, so it mostly waits for people who already know your name.
Rent-a-site retainer: The quiet trap of the industry. Three years at $250 a month is $9,000, and the day you stop paying, the site, the content, and often the domain go with it. Read the contract before signing one of these.
The RankNext build: Custom design for your trade, 40+ pages matching how customers search, plus chat, booking, a reviews engine, and instant callback. One payment; everything transfers to you at launch.
Custom agency build: Frequently good work, commonly quoted at $8,000 to $15,000 for trades, delivered after weeks of meetings. You are paying for their process as much as your site.
What actually drives the price
Four things separate a $500 site from one that pays for itself.
Page depth. Your customers search a service, in a town, often as a full question. A five-page site can answer almost none of that; a 40-page site built around real searches gives Google and AI assistants something to show. Writing those pages well is most of the honest labor in any quote you receive.
Capture infrastructure. Traffic without capture is decoration. Chat that books appointments, online scheduling, a reviews engine, and instant callback for missed calls are what turn a visit into a job, and most quotes below $3,000 include none of them.
Launch SEO. Structure, schema markup, speed, sitemap and indexing, Google Business Profile connection. Skipping this is how a beautiful site stays invisible; it belongs in the build, not in an upsell.
Ownership. The cheapest-looking option is often a rental. Whatever you pay, get it in writing that the domain, design, content, and code are yours. Ours says exactly that, in our terms.
Price against your own numbers
The only cost question that matters: jobs to cover it.
Whatever you spend on a website, divide it by your average job. If the site brings even a handful of jobs a year, the arithmetic tends to end the debate. At $3,500, using common job values:
| Roofing | $9,000 replacement | covered after 1 job |
| HVAC | $7,000 system | covered after 1 job |
| Fencing | $4,500 install | covered after 1 job |
| Plumbing | $1,800 water heater | covered after 2 jobs |
| Handyman | $400 visit | covered after 9 visits |
Common ranges for illustration; run your own. New pages typically need two to four months to earn their place in search results, whoever builds them. We say that out loud because you should distrust anyone who does not.
Cost questions, answered straight
Before money moves.
Why pay $3,500 once instead of $99 a month?
Do the three-year math. $99 a month is $3,564, right where our one-time price sits, except at the end of it you commonly own nothing: cancel and the rent-a-site vanishes. Pay once and the site, domain, content, and code are yours from launch day, with only ordinary hosting (typically $20 to $40 a month, paid directly to providers under your own accounts) to keep it running. And the monthly plans that cheap rarely include 40+ pages built around how your customers search, which is the part that makes a site produce work rather than just exist.
Is $3,500 too cheap to be any good?
Fair question, since custom trade sites are commonly quoted at $8,000 to $15,000. The difference is focus: we only build for local service businesses, so the expensive thinking, which pages a plumber needs, what a roofing customer asks before calling, how a booking flow should work for an emergency trade, is already done and refined. Your money goes into your towns, your services, and your photos instead of an agency rediscovering the wheel. You can judge the output yourself: every build includes the same structure you can inspect on this site.
What are the ongoing costs after the build?
Hosting and your domain, typically $20 to $40 a month combined, paid straight to those providers on accounts you own. The chat, booking, and callback tools are configured on sensible free or low tiers wherever possible; heavy usage on some tools can grow into their paid plans, and we tell you before that would happen. There is no required RankNext subscription. Our monthly plans exist for owners who want ongoing work, more pages, Google Business Profile management, review velocity, but the build stands on its own without them.
Can I start with a cheap site now and upgrade later?
You can, and plenty of owners do. The honest trade-off: a $500 template usually has to be thrown away rather than upgraded, because the problem is not the paint, it is the structure. Rebuilding later commonly costs more than building it to be found once. If cash is genuinely tight, a builder site that at least states your services, area, and phone number beats nothing, and when you are ready, we build on your existing domain so any history it earned carries over.
Does the price change for bigger service areas or more services?
The $3,500 covers the standard build: custom design, 40+ pages, and the full capture layer, which fits the great majority of single-market service businesses. If you cover multiple metros or run several brands, the page map grows, and we quote that plainly before anything starts, no surprises after kickoff. Multi-location owners sometimes pair the build with our monthly multi-location plan instead; we will tell you honestly which fits.
One price. Everything included. Yours forever.
Custom design, 40+ pages built for how your customers search, and the infrastructure to catch every call.
One-time payment · no subscription required · everything transfers at launch