Short answer, before the details: most agencies quote contractors $3,000 to $8,000 to build a website, do it yourself builders run about $20 to $60 a month plus a lot of your own evenings, and a full service setup like ours is $297 a month with no build fee.
That is the range. The more useful question is what you actually get for each one, and which hidden costs land on you three months later. Let's go through it the way you would walk a customer through an estimate.
The four ways contractors buy a website
1. You build it yourself on a website builder
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. Call it $20 to $60 a month. It looks like the cheap option and sometimes it is the right call if you are brand new and have zero budget.
The real cost is your time and the ceiling. Most contractors we talk to spent 30 to 50 hours of nights and weekends on theirs. What they ended up with is a decent looking brochure that Google has no reason to show anybody, because a builder template does not give you a page per service or a page per town. If your time is worth $75 an hour, that "cheap" site cost you three grand in labor and it still does not rank.
2. The cheap freelancer
$500 to $1,500, often found overseas. You get a real site, usually fast. What you usually do not get is anybody who understands how a homeowner searches for a contractor in your county, and you rarely get anybody to call in six months when something breaks.
It is not that freelancers are bad. Plenty are excellent. It is that at that price nobody can afford to do the local SEO structure work, so you are buying a design, not a lead source.
3. The local agency
$3,000 to $8,000 up front is the normal quote, and it climbs past $15,000 for anything genuinely custom. Then hosting and maintenance is usually another $50 to $200 a month, and SEO on top of that is commonly $1,000 to $3,000 a month.
Good agencies earn it. The problem for a small contractor is the shape of the deal: you hand over five thousand dollars before you have seen a single lead, and every change after launch is billable.
4. One flat monthly price, everything included
This is the model we run. No build fee, no contract, $297 a month. The build, the hosting, the local SEO, the review automation and the AI lead follow up are all in the one number. We built it this way because contractors kept telling us the same thing: they did not have five thousand dollars sitting idle, and they did not want to find out after paying it that the site does nothing.
The costs nobody puts in the proposal
This is where website budgets actually blow up. Read any quote looking for these five:
- Hosting. $10 to $200 a month forever. Sometimes quietly marked up.
- The domain. Small, $15 to $50 a year, but make sure your name is on it and not the agency's.
- The security certificate. Often free, sometimes billed at $100 a year anyway.
- Updates. A WordPress site with a dozen plugins needs real maintenance. Skip it and you eventually get hacked or broken.
- Changes. The big one. Many shops bill $100 to $200 an hour to edit text. New service, new phone number, new photos, each one is an invoice.
"What is my total cost over 12 months, including hosting, updates and three text changes?" Get it in writing. Watch how many quotes suddenly grow.
What you are actually buying
Nobody wants a website. You want your phone to ring with jobs you can bid. So judge any quote against what actually produces calls for a contractor:
A page per service
Not one Services page with a list. A real page for each thing you get paid for, because that is how people search.
A page per town
People search "drain cleaning Streamwood," not "drain cleaning." One page per town you drive to.
Your Google profile tuned
The map pack sits above everything else. For most trades it is worth more than the website itself.
Reviews on autopilot
Review count and freshness move you up the map. It has to happen after every job, not when you remember.
Instant lead follow up
The company that answers first usually gets hired. You are on a roof. Something has to answer for you.
Fast on a phone
Most of your customers are searching on a phone. Three seconds and they are gone.
A $6,000 site with none of that is worse value than a $297 a month system with all of it. Price is not the number on the quote, it is the number divided by the jobs it brings you.
How to compare two quotes honestly
Put both quotes side by side and answer six questions about each:
- How many pages, and is there one for every service and every town?
- Who writes the words, me or them?
- Does it include the Google Business Profile work, or is that extra?
- What happens when a lead comes in at 9pm on a Sunday?
- What does a text change cost after launch?
- Do I own the domain and the content if I leave?
Whichever quote answers those six cleanly is the cheaper one, almost regardless of the price on the front page.
Want to see real examples instead of numbers?
Fair. We publish the builds so you can judge them yourself rather than take our word for it. Look at the landscaping site we built for Vista Landscape Management and the plumbing site we built for TJM Sewer and Plumbing. Both are live, both list every page, and both cost the owner $297 a month.
Then go look at whoever is outranking you in your town and ask which of the two their site looks more like.
The bottom line
A contractor website costs anywhere from $20 a month to $15,000 up front, and the price tells you almost nothing about whether it will bring you work. What matters is structure, whether somebody is doing your local SEO and reviews, and what happens to a lead after hours.
Our answer is one flat $297 a month with no build fee and no contract, because that is the version we would want if we were the one holding the ladder.