"What do I actually get for $99?" is the first thing every contractor asks us, usually in a tone that says they've been burned before. Fair enough. Here is the whole list, including the parts that are not in it.
What $99 a month covers
This is our Starter plan. One payment a month, no setup fee, no contract.
- A three-page website, built for you. Usually a home page, a services page and a contact page. We write it and build it. You don't log in to anything.
- Your domain name. One standard .com is included. If you already own one, we connect it and nothing about it changes.
- One business email address at that domain, like mike@smithplumbing.com, set up so it works on your phone.
- A phone number people can tap. Your number sits at the top of every screen as a button that starts a call.
- A contact form that emails you the moment someone fills it in.
- Hosting and security. The site lives on our hosting with an SSL certificate, which is the padlock in the address bar.
- A site that works on a phone. That is where most of your customers will see it.
Once you start the plan, the site goes live within five business days.
What $99 does not cover
This is the part most price lists skip.
- A photo gallery and before-and-after slider. Those start on the Pro plan.
- Your Google reviews shown on the site. Also Pro.
- Free updates. On Starter, changes after launch are billed per request. Pro includes two a month and Premium has no limit.
- Advertising. No plan includes Google or Facebook ads. We build the place people land. Sending them there with paid ads is a separate job and a separate budget.
- A logo. If you have one, we use it. If you don't, the site uses your company name in clean type, or we design a logo as a one-time add-on.
- A promise about Google rankings. Nobody can honestly sell you a number one spot, and we don't try.
What the bigger plans add
Pro, $149 a month. Everything in Starter, plus the photo gallery with before-and-after photos, your Google reviews on the page, three email addresses in place of one, help setting up your Google Business Profile, and two update requests a month.
Premium, $199 a month. Everything in Pro, plus local SEO setup, a longer online quote request form, six email addresses, unlimited update requests, priority support and a review of the site with you every quarter.
Local SEO setup deserves a plain definition, because the term gets abused. It means we write your city and your services into every page, connect your Google Business Profile to the site, and fill in the details Google reads behind the scenes. It is setup work that we recheck each quarter. It is not a monthly campaign.
Which plan fits
If you're new, have no job photos yet and only a couple of reviews, Starter does the job. It gets your name, your services, your towns and your number in front of anyone who looks you up.
Move to Pro when you have ten or so good photos and a handful of reviews. At that point the gallery and the reviews do more selling than anything we could write, and leaving them off the site wastes them.
Premium makes sense when you change things often, like seasonal services or storm banners, or when you want the longer quote form to sort serious jobs from tire kickers.
You can move between plans. Nobody is locked into the one they started on.
What you keep if you cancel
You can cancel any time by email, and you aren't charged again after the period you've paid for. Here is what happens to each piece.
- Your domain is yours. We transfer it to any registrar you choose.
- Your email address goes with the domain. You can set it up again with any provider, and you get 30 days to move it before the mailbox closes.
- Your content is yours. Photos, logo, text and reviews all come back to you.
- The website itself stays with us. The design and the code behind it are ours. That is the trade that makes $99 a month possible in place of a large bill up front.
How that compares
You have two other honest options. A do-it-yourself builder costs less per month, and you pay the difference in evenings: picking a template, writing the words, working out why the phone button doesn't work. Some contractors enjoy that. Most have a half-finished site from two years ago.
The other option is paying a designer or an agency to build a custom site. You own it outright, which matters to some people, and you pay for the whole build before it goes live. Then hosting, updates and email are yours to sort out.
We sit between the two. Someone else does the work, and you pay by the month for as long as it earns its keep.
See it before you spend anything
The easiest way to judge any of this is to look at your own site. Tell us five things about your business and you get a free preview with your name on it, no card needed. The full plan details are on the pricing table if you'd like to read them first.