Contractor Website Cost: What You Pay, and What You Own

A contractor website costs anywhere from $17 a month on a builder you run yourself to $3,659 a month plus a $995 start-up charge from a web firm that builds sites for contractors. In between sit a website included free with your scheduling software, a $150-a-month plan from a one-person studio, and one-time builds from about $2,250. That spread is the honest answer to the contractor website cost question, and every number in it is the seller's own.

The difference that matters more than the price is what you own when you stop paying. Thryv's terms say the design it builds belongs to Thryv. Housecall Pro's say it owns the copy it writes for you. Hibu's say a domain it provides is registered to Hibu. Scorpion says the site is yours once the contract is complete, and then you rebuild it somewhere else.

We build websites for trade contractors, so weigh this accordingly. Every price below was read on the seller's own page on 2026-10-04, and every seller is named. No contractor is.

Contractor website costs at a glance

Prices change often and every one of these was current on 2026-10-04. The rest of this article is the detail behind each row, plus what 18 real contractor sites in the Sacramento region actually run on.

What 18 local contractor sites run on

For our audit of contractor websites we drew 42 licensed contractors at random from California's license file for the Sacramento region. Eighteen have a website of their own. We read the code behind each one:

Three things stood out.

Half run WordPress. WordPress is open-source software, so a WordPress site can be moved to any host that runs it. That is the most portable option on the list, and half of our sample already uses it.

Six credit an outside builder in the footer: Housecall Pro, Scorpion, and four small local web firms. Not one of the four local firms publishes a price for a website on its homepage or a pricing page. One publishes a hosting price, from $6.99 a month. So the most common way a contractor site in this sample got built is also the one where you cannot find the price until you ask.

Four run a GoDaddy builder that GoDaddy no longer leads with. Its website builder page now sells a newer AI builder, priced below.

Nobody independent has measured this

Search "how much does a contractor website cost" and the top results are cost-estimate pages with tidy medians. The first one we got, from Project Cost Estimator, says a general contractor site runs $3,600 to $11,600 with a freelancer, "lands around a $7,600 median," and is "Based on 600+ project quotes and rate benchmarks." The same page explains how the figures are made: "Every figure applies the engine's real geographic multipliers (US 1.45×, UK 1.15×, Western Europe 1.0×, Eastern Europe 0.55×) to the general contractor baseline." The quotes themselves are not published. It also says "We don't build websites, so the number has no reason to be inflated," and sells buyers a $49 quote analysis and a $129 expert review.

That is a model's output, not a measurement of what contractors paid. So we looked for a measurement. The Census Bureau's Annual Business Survey publishes tables on business technologies, cloud services and the digital share of business activity, and none of them is website spending. Our research also searched the SBA's Office of Advocacy, the home builders', remodelers', plumbing, HVAC, electrical and roofing contractors' associations, the Home Improvement Research Institute, Google Scholar and SSRN. No survey of what contractors spend on a website surfaced anywhere we could look.

So every price in this article comes from someone selling the thing being priced. That is not a reason to distrust them. It is a reason to read the terms underneath them.

Builders you run yourself: cheapest, and the price shown is year one

• Wix: $17 to $159 a month. Its plans page says "Displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions, paid in full at the time of purchase."
• Squarespace: $19 to $99 a month on annual billing.
• GoDaddy: its current AI builder is "$9.99 / month For the first 1-year term. Auto-renews at $179.88." That renewal works out to $14.99 a month, so year two costs 50% more than year one.

The same pattern shows up on the domain. GoDaddy's pricing page advertises a .com from "$0.01 /1st year" with "a 3-year purchase." The renewal price is not on that page.

On the older GoDaddy builder the four sample sites use, GoDaddy's own backup help page says a backup "only backs up your site's sections, text and settings. It doesn't include other parts of your account, such as blogs, marketing emails, products, appointments or images." That is a backup inside GoDaddy, not a copy you can take elsewhere. Neither research pass found a GoDaddy page saying whether a site on that builder can be moved to another host, so ask before you build on it.

A builder suits a contractor who will actually spend a Saturday on it. The cost that never shows on the plans page is your time.

The website inside your scheduling software

If you already pay for field service software, you may already have a website option.

Jobber includes one. Its help center says: "Included on all Jobber plans at no extra cost: Website." Plans start at $29 a month billed annually. A domain bought through Jobber is registered with its partner IONOS, and Jobber's domain help page says "If you ever decide to cancel or stop using your domain, that will also be managed directly through IONOS, not Jobber." Its cancellation article says you lose access to "clients, jobs, invoices, and any other information stored in Jobber." It does not say what happens to the website.

Housecall Pro sells "a professional website built and managed by Housecall Pro" as an add-on to plans that start at $59 a month. The add-on's price is not published. Its terms of service, last modified July 1, 2026, are clear about ownership:

• What you upload stays yours: "All Materials you upload remain your property."
• What Housecall Pro writes does not: "Housecall Pro may generate materials for your Pro Website. Housecall Pro retains sole and exclusive ownership of any such materials."
• If you bring your own domain, "you may be required to transfer management of the domain name to Housecall Pro."
• If you cancel, it will transfer the domain "at your written request," and "if no instructions for transfer are received within 30 days after your cancellation takes effect, then we will cease to renew your domain name."

The practical rule: if you ever leave, send the domain transfer request in writing the same day you cancel.

Marketing companies: monthly, on contract, and read the ownership clause

These companies sell a bundle (ads, listings, reviews, social posts) with the website inside it. Compare them on the bundle. But the website clause is where contractors get surprised.

Thryv publishes its prices: Starter at $99 a month with an "AI website builder," Signature at $399 a month with an "SEO & AEO Custom website." Its terms for Thryv Marketing Center set "the initial minimum Subscription Period" at "six (6) months," then month to month. Its AEO and SEO terms, updated July 1, 2026, say that if Thryv designs your website, "such content and the composition and design of the website we create are our sole and exclusive property or that of our licensors, except for any of your own content." Its 2023 terms for professional websites promise to release your web address on termination "if it was your domain originally."

Hibu does not publish a price. Its contractors page says "Hibu offers 6-month contracts" and "Hibu's pricing is custom to your goals and the competition in your area." Its digital services terms say: "The Domain Name we provide for your website will be registered to us." You can ask to have it transferred to your name and Hibu says it will help. On cancellation, a customer who paid in full in advance gets a "non-exclusive, worldwide and perpetual right" to use "any written copy that we have created for You," and the terms add: "We are not responsible for storing Your Data or Your Content following cancellation of the Services for any reason."

Scorpion does not publish a price either: "The investment you decide to make with Scorpion depends on your business goals." Its home services page says Scorpion "typically requires a 12-month contract for our marketing technology and certain marketing services like search engine optimization (SEO)," and "you own your website after the length of your contract with Scorpion is complete." What you leave with is "your website's static files, design assets, and content," and then: "You'll need to work with another vendor to rebuild your website on a content management system of your choosing."

None of this is hidden. All three companies publish it. It is just written somewhere other than the pricing page.

Contractor web firms that publish a price

A few firms that build sites only for contractors put a number on the page. Each is a web firm selling its own service, so read them the way you would read ours:

Notice the spread on the same kind of business: $150 a month from one firm, $3,659 a month from another, and the cheapest monthly plan on the list is also the one that does not say who owns the result.

What it costs to keep running

Whatever you build, a site has running costs:

• Hosting. GoDaddy's WordPress hosting runs $6.99 to $14.99 a month for the first year, $14.99 to $26.99 at regular price. Builders and monthly plans include it.
• The domain, renewed every year, ideally in your own name.
• Paid plugins. Of our nine WordPress sites, four use the Elementor page builder (from $60 a year) and two the Divi theme ($89 a year).
• Someone to change it when your phone number, license or services change. That is the line most often left out, and the one that decides whether the site is still right in year three.

Five questions to ask before you sign

1. Whose name is the domain registered in? If it is not yours, ask what it takes to move it, in writing.
2. What do I have when I leave? A working site, a folder of files, or a license to the words?
3. How long is the contract, and what does it renew into?
4. What does year two cost? The plans page shows year one.
5. Who owns the words and photos you write or take for me?

What we charge at Flare Built

We publish our ranges. A Launch build, a sharp one-page site, starts at $900 and is typically live in about 48 hours. A Signature build, five to eight bespoke pages you can edit yourself, starts at $4,500. Custom platforms start at $15,000. After launch, Flare Care covers hosting, security, updates and priority support, from $95 a month. It is a build, not a rental, so year two costs a care plan rather than another full year of a bundle.

Where we are not the right fit: if most of your work is same-day emergency calls, a website is not where your next job comes from. A complete Google Business Profile, real reviews and a phone that gets answered will do more for you, and we will say so. A site earns its keep for the contractor whose customers compare quotes over days, on jobs worth thousands. That is who we build for. Get in touch.

How we did this, so you can check it

• The contractors. The same 42 as our website audit, our Google profile check and our BuildZoom check: seven each in plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, low voltage and general building, drawn at random from the Contractors State License Board's public file for Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado and Yolo counties. Eighteen have a website of their own.
• Platforms. On 2026-10-04 we fetched each homepage with an ordinary desktop browser identity and read the platform from the page's own code (generator tags, asset hosts and vendor scripts), then checked every match by hand. One site answered our script with a bot check, so we opened it in a normal browser instead. Builder credits are what each footer says.
• Local web firms. We checked each credited firm's homepage and its obvious pricing pages for a website price.
• Prices and terms. Every price and quotation was read on the seller's own page on 2026-10-04, in a browser where the page needed one. Prices on these pages change often, so check them before you rely on them.
• Independent data. The search for an independent measure of contractor website spending is described above. Finding none where we looked is not proof that none exists.
• Limits. Eighteen sites in one region. Nothing here is a rate for California or the trades as a whole.