What should a local service business website actually cost?
Quotes for the same project routinely range from $500 to $25,000, which makes the whole category feel arbitrary. It isn't. Price tracks scope, and scope tracks how much of the revenue problem the site is expected to solve.
The four realistic tiers
| Tier | Typical range |
|---|---|
DIY template Brand-new operators who need a placeholder while they get their first jobs. Generic layout, weak page speed, little to no local SEO structure, no conversion design. | $0 – $500 |
Freelancer build Established businesses that mainly need a credible, clean five-to-ten page site. Quality varies widely; SEO and ongoing support are usually out of scope. | $1,500 – $5,000 |
Studio build Companies competing for high-ticket work who need positioning, copy, SEO and speed together. Only worth it if the studio can show measured results, not just visuals. | $6,000 – $20,000 |
Ongoing partnership Businesses that want continuous SEO, content, performance and iteration after launch. Requires a clear scope and reporting, or it quietly turns into hosting fees. | Monthly retainer |
What actually drives the price
Page count matters far less than people expect. The real cost drivers are original copy, photography, the number of distinct service and location pages that need genuine content, technical SEO and schema work, performance engineering, and integrations like booking, quoting or CRM handoff.
A ten-page site with stock photos and filler text is cheap and behaves like it. A six-page site with real photos, sharp positioning and a sub-second load will outperform it every time.
Where the money gets wasted
Three patterns come up in nearly every audit. Paying for a redesign that changes the visuals but keeps the same weak structure and copy. Paying a monthly fee that quietly covers hosting and nothing else. And paying for traffic — ads or SEO — pointed at a page that was never built to convert it.
How to judge the number you're quoted
Work backwards from job value. If your average job is $8,000 and the site is expected to produce a handful of extra jobs a year, a $10,000 build pays for itself quickly — but only if the proposal names the outcomes it's targeting, the pages it includes, the performance budget, and how results will be measured.
Any proposal that can't answer "what will you measure, and when" is selling a design, not a business asset.