Answers · for owner-operators

How much does a contractor website cost?

Anywhere from a cheap monthly builder subscription to well into five figures, and the sticker price is the least useful part of the answer. A DIY builder subscription is cheap — as published in mid-2026, plans start in the teens per month billed annually — but it buys a page, not a finished website, and you supply the domain renewal, the words, the photographs and the weekends. Freelancer and agency quotes vary enormously, mostly according to who writes the content. OutfitterAI is free to build and the site is yours to keep, with $79/mo or $474/yr covering the running of it, including a phone that gets answered. The real question isn’t the sticker price — it’s whether you’re paying in money or in hours, and which of those you actually have.

OutfitterAI’s agent Emma builds your site live while you’re on the phone with her — about ten minutes, no editor, no email loops. That’s the only pitch here; the rest is numbers.

The four routes, with what each one really costs

Every price below is as published in mid-2026, with its billing basis, because annual-versus-monthly is where comparison pages mislead. Prices change — check the source before you commit.

Route	Published price	What you still supply
DIY builder — Wix	Light $17/mo billed annually, $24/mo billed monthly; Core $29 / $36; Business $39 / $46; Business Elite $159 / $172. A free plan exists with limits.	Domain after year one, all copy, all photos, the setup weekend, the upkeep
DIY builder — Squarespace	Basic $19/mo billed annually, $25/mo billed monthly; Core $29 / $39; Plus $49 / $65; Advanced $99 / $139	Same list
DIY builder — GoDaddy	Billed annually on a 12-month term: Basic $9.99/mo introductory, renewing at $16.99/mo; Premium $14.99 renewing at $29.99; Commerce $20.99 renewing at $34.99. A free plan exists with limitations.	Same list, plus a renewal bill roughly double the first
Freelancer	Quotes vary enormously. A custom build can be a couple of thousand dollars, and other published estimates run considerably lower — the sources disagree, so treat any single range as a guess.	Usually the content and photos; often the upkeep after handover
Agency	Also enormously variable, and can run well into five figures. Scope and who writes the copy move the number most.	Less, but you pay for that. Changes later are usually billed.
OutfitterAI	Free to build, site yours to keep. $79/mo or $474/yr. Thirty-day money-back guarantee, cancel anytime.	Ten minutes on the phone with Emma

Read the annual price properly, and watch the renewal

Two things catch people out here, neither a trick — they’re just easy to skim past.

The first is that the headline number is almost always the annually-billed rate. Wix’s Light plan is $17 a month if you pay a year up front and $24 if you pay monthly; Squarespace’s Basic is $19 against $25. The cheap number is one you only get by handing over twelve months at once.

The second is GoDaddy’s introductory rate. Basic is $9.99 a month on a 12-month term and then renews at $16.99; Premium goes from $14.99 to $29.99. The bill roughly doubles the year after you stopped thinking about it. That isn’t a criticism — the renewal rate is published and it’s simply the standard price. It’s that year two is the year that surprises people, so compare on year-two numbers.

The costs nobody puts in the quote

This is what makes the DIY column look cheaper than it is. None of it is a hidden fee — it’s real work that has to happen, and on that route it happens to you.

The domain, every year after the first. Builders commonly include a free domain for year one. After that it renews on its own bill, often from a different company to the one hosting your site. Miss that email and your website goes dark.
Your weekend. Not the page — the page is quick now. It’s the DNS, the certificate, the form that has to reach an inbox you actually check, the Google listing that has to agree with the site. That list is written out in full on can I build my own website with an AI tool? Whatever your hour is worth on a job is the real line item here.
Every word on the site. The builder hands you a layout with placeholder text. Nobody is going to describe your drainage work for you. This is where most half-built contractor sites stop — a live homepage and an empty services page.
The photographs. Stock images of somebody else’s kitchen do nothing for you. Before-and-afters of your own jobs are what convince a homeowner, and getting them means remembering to, on site, before you clean up.
A phone that gets answered. No builder subscription includes this, and it’s the biggest gap of the lot. Plenty of homeowners won’t fill in a form — they ring, get voicemail and call the next contractor while your page sits there looking excellent.

The checklist of what the site itself needs to contain is in what should a contractor website include.

Which route is actually right for you

Wix and Squarespace are good products. Genuinely — the templates are well designed, the editors are pleasant, and if you enjoy sitting down with one on a Sunday you’ll end up with a site that sounds like you. GoDaddy is cheap to start and perfectly capable. A good freelancer will out-think all of them on your business, and a good agency hands you something you never had to touch.

So the honest summary is this: the DIY route is cheap in money and expensive in time, the agency route is exactly the reverse, and the freelancer sits between them. The question isn’t which is best in the abstract — it’s which currency you actually have to spend.

OutfitterAI is for the owner whose answer is "neither, really." The build is free and the site is yours to keep, so you aren’t paying for a page. The $79 a month, or $474 for the year, is the domain, DNS, hosting, SSL, contact forms that reach you, the Front Desk agent answering your phone 24/7 and booking jobs, your Google Business Profile managed, review requests sent and followed up, and changes made by asking the agent in plain words. That’s what makes the comparison like-for-like: a builder subscription buys a page; this buys the page, the ten things underneath it, and somebody picking up.

Common questions

What’s the cheapest way to get a contractor website?

A free builder plan, or a paid plan billed annually — as published in mid-2026, GoDaddy’s Basic is $9.99 a month introductory on a 12-month term and Wix’s Light is $17 a month billed annually. That’s the cheapest in cash, not the cheapest in total: you supply the content, the photos, the setup and the upkeep, and year two renews higher. Prices change, so check before you buy.

Why do freelancer and agency quotes vary so much?

Because "a website" isn’t one thing. Published 2026 estimates disagree with each other substantially, which tells you the honest answer is a spread, not a figure. What moves the number most is scope and who writes the copy and sources the photos — a build where you hand over finished text and images costs a fraction of one where they produce it all.

Is $79 a month expensive for a contractor website?

Against a builder subscription alone, yes, it’s more. Against a builder subscription plus the domain renewal plus the weekends plus somebody answering the phone, it isn’t the same comparison. Judge it per job: if the phone being answered at nine on a Saturday night wins one extra call a year, the arithmetic isn’t close. If you’d genuinely enjoy building and running it yourself, do that instead — that’s a legitimate choice.

Have Emma build it on the phone

She’ll ask about your trade, your service area and the work you want more of, and the site is live before you hang up. Free to build, and yours to keep.

Meet Emma → See pricing

Last updated 29 August 2026.