Pricing

How much does a website cost? Depends what it does.

Everyone asks, and almost nobody answers honestly. Here's the answer: the type of site sets the tier, and your revenue sets the sensible investment. No mystery, no 'starting at' teasers.

The type sets the tier

  1. 01

    Brochure site

    A digital business card: who you are, what you do, how to reach you. A handful of pages that make you look legitimate when someone checks you out.

    What moves the number: Page count and content. The smallest build I do, and for some businesses it is honestly all they need.

  2. 02

    Portfolio site

    For work that sells visually: painters, contractors, designers. Project galleries with real stories, organized so the work does the convincing.

    What moves the number: How many projects we showcase and how much story each one gets. The gallery is the product.

  3. 03

    Lead-generation engine

    What I build most. Service pages that rank, content that answers what your customers search, and every page pointed at the phone call. The site becomes an employee.

    What moves the number: Services and towns we target, content volume, and whether ongoing SEO is part of the engagement. This is where the percentage math below earns its keep.

  4. 04

    E-commerce

    A store, not a site. Products, payments, shipping, taxes, email flows. It is a different animal with different economics.

    What moves the number: Catalog size, integrations, and operations. Priced like the business system it is.

Never buy a website by the page

A lot of agencies price websites like carpet: so much per page, pick a quantity. It sounds fair. It is a land scoop, and it works against you twice.

First, it rigs the incentive. When the seller gets paid per page, you get sold pages. Twenty of them, each a paragraph deep, each "only" a few hundred dollars. Your bill goes up with the page count. Your results do not, because a page is not the unit of value. A customer picking up the phone is.

Second, those padded pages actively hurt you. Google calls them thin content: pages that exist to exist, with nothing on them worth ranking. They dilute your site's authority and compete with your real pages. You paid extra to make your own website worse.

The honest unit is the outcome. One deep page that answers "water heater replacement cost" beats ten thin ones, costs less, and actually ranks. That is why everything here is priced by what the site needs to accomplish, never by counting pages.

Your revenue sets the investment

Here is the sizing rule serious businesses use: invest about 10% of yearly revenue in marketing, and make the website the foundation, roughly half of that. So a sensible first-year website investment is about 5% of what your business brings in.

You size a bid to the job in front of you. This is the same discipline pointed at your own growth: proportional, defensible, and tied to what a new customer is worth.

How long have you been in business?

A sensible website investment for your size

$16,000 – $24,000

That's 4-6% of your revenue, the foundation half of a normal ~10% marketing budget ($40,000/yr for a business your size). Usually split between the build and the first year of SEO and content.

8 jobs

At $2,500 per job, that's all it takes for the site to pay for itself. Total. Not per month.

3.0×

If the site brings just 2 extra jobs a month, that's $60,000 a year in new work — 3.0 times the investment.

Notice what's missing: me asking for your budget. Run your own numbers, bring the range. That's the whole conversation.

Don't take my word for it

The percentage method and the case against per-page pricing aren't my opinions. Here's the research:

  • Marketing budgets really do run ~10% of revenue. The CMO Survey (Duke University, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association) has tracked marketing spend for over a decade; budgets consistently land around a tenth of company revenues. The percentage method just rights-sizes that to your business.

    The CMO Survey ↗

  • The SBA says budget by revenue percentage, too. The U.S. Small Business Administration's guidance for small businesses has long pointed to a percentage of gross revenue as the sane way to size marketing spend, not flat packages or guesswork.

    SBA: Marketing & sales ↗

  • Quality beats quantity, measurably. Google's own research shows site speed and experience move revenue: faster pages convert measurably better, which is why the investment goes into fewer, better pages instead of more of them.

    Google web.dev: Why speed matters ↗

  • Google actively targets padded pages. Its spam policies name "scaled content abuse": pages produced for volume rather than for people. Per-page pricing manufactures exactly the thing Google demotes. That's the sinkhole: you pay per page, then the pages drag your real ones down.

    Google Search spam policies ↗

  • Small-business benchmarks agree. BDC's survey of small and mid-size businesses found the ones that grow are the ones that budget marketing deliberately as a share of what they earn.

    BDC: Average marketing budgets ↗

Then you get a real number

One conversation. I learn what you do, what a customer is worth, and what you want the site to accomplish. You get an itemized proposal, usually with two or three options at different scopes, priced like a bid because you'll respect that.

No "starting at" bait. No surprise line items. And if the honest answer is that your current site just needs fixes instead of a rebuild, that is the answer you'll get.

Pricing questions, answered straight

Why don't you just list exact prices?
Because a $300,000 plumbing company and a $2M excavation outfit should not buy the same website, and a fixed price list would push them both toward the wrong one. I publish the logic instead: what type of site you need, what moves the number, and how to size the investment to your revenue. Then you get a real, itemized number after one conversation.
What does a typical trades website actually cost?
Run the math on your own business: take roughly 5% of your yearly revenue as a sensible first-year website investment. A $400,000-a-year plumbing company lands around $20,000, usually split between the build and the first year of SEO and content work. Smaller operations land smaller numbers. The site should pay that back in a handful of jobs, and we will talk honestly about whether it can.
Why size it as a percentage of revenue?
Because that is how you bid. You size a job to the project in front of you, not off a one-size price sheet. Marketing works the same way: businesses that grow typically invest around 10% of revenue in marketing, and the website is the foundation half of that. Sizing to revenue keeps the investment proportional to what a new customer is actually worth to you.
Another agency quoted me per page. Is that cheaper?
It looks cheaper and usually costs more. Per-page pricing rewards the seller for padding your site with thin pages that Google ignores and that dilute the pages doing real work. You end up paying for quantity that actively hurts your rankings. Price the outcome, not the page count.
Do you offer payment options?
Yes. Most engagements present two or three options at different scopes, and build costs can be split across milestones. The ongoing work (hosting, care, SEO) is a flat monthly number with no surprises.
What are the ongoing costs after launch?
Hosting and care is a flat monthly rate: infrastructure, backups, monitoring, updates, and a set amount of my time. If we are doing ongoing SEO and content, that is a separate monthly engagement sized to how aggressively you want to grow. Both are itemized, both are cancelable.

Want your number?

Tell me about your business. One conversation, one itemized proposal, no pressure either way.