What should a contractor website actually cost?
Four ways to buy one, what each costs by month twelve, and the question that settles it.
Ask four people what a contractor website costs and you get four numbers between nothing and twenty thousand dollars, because they are answering four different questions. Here are the four ways this is actually bought, what each one costs once a year has gone by, and the question that decides between them.
The four ways
| Build it yourself on a website builder | A monthly platform fee, plus your evenings |
|---|---|
| Hire a freelancer to build it once | A one-time project fee, then nothing changes |
| A local marketing agency | A setup fee, then a monthly retainer |
| A subscription that builds and runs it | One monthly price, no setup fee |
Figures below are ranges contractors commonly report in the US market and vary widely by region and scope. Get your own quotes.
Build it yourself
The platform fee is the small part; the real cost is that you are now the designer, the copywriter and the person who has to remember to update it. That is fine if you enjoy it and have the evenings. What usually happens instead is that the site goes up in a burst of enthusiasm, the About page still says "coming soon" two years later, and it has never once made the phone ring.
The specific failure is structural rather than aesthetic: almost nobody builds the page-per-service-per-town grid by hand, because writing twelve pages is twelve evenings. So the site ends up as one Services page listing ten services, which ranks for none of them.
A freelancer, once
Commonly $1,500–$5,000 for a small business site in the US. You get a designed site and, if the freelancer is good, a sensible structure. What you do not get is anything after handover, and websites are not finished objects. Six months on, the seasons have moved, competitors have published, and your site says exactly what it said on day one.
The question to ask before paying is not about design. It is: who owns the domain and the hosting account, and who updates this in month six? If the answer to the first is "the freelancer" you do not own your website, and that is the most common ugly surprise in this market.
An agency
Commonly a $2,000–$10,000 build plus $500–$3,000 a month. A good local agency genuinely earns this: real strategy, real content, someone who answers the phone. A bad one bills the retainer for a monthly report about work that did not move anything, and this trade has been burned by enough of them that the word "agency" now does some damage on its own.
If you go this way, two things are worth putting in writing: that you own the site and the domain outright, and what specifically is delivered each month. "Ongoing SEO" is not a deliverable. "Two new service-area pages a month" is.
A subscription
One monthly price with no setup fee, and the site is built and maintained for you. The tradeoff is honest and worth stating: you get less design freedom than any of the three above. You are buying a structure built for this trade rather than a blank canvas, and if what you want is a bespoke look, that is a real reason to choose differently.
The comparison that actually matters
Not the price on day one, the position at month twelve. A one-time build is cheapest in January and, if nothing has been added since, is a business card by December. A subscription costs every month and has twelve more pages and a ranking that compounds.
And measure both against what a job is worth. If a water heater replacement nets you several hundred dollars, most of these options pay for themselves at one or two jobs a year. The expensive option is the one that produces none.
The question that settles it
Who is updating this in six months? If you cannot name a person, do not buy something that needs updating.
If the answer is "me, and I will enjoy it", build it yourself. If it is "my agency, and here is what they deliver monthly", that works. If the honest answer is "nobody", then a one-time build is money spent on something that will quietly stop working, and what you want is the version where updating is somebody else’s job by design.