What a contractor website should cost per month
The parts of a small contractor site cost about a dollar a month. Everything above that is labor, and labor is the whole argument.
Hosting is $0 on Cloudflare’s free plan, which covers 100,000 requests a day, and Cloudflare states requests to static files are free with no bandwidth charge (Cloudflare pricing documentation, checked August 2026). A domain is $11.08 a year at Porkbun to register and to renew (porkbun.com/tld/com, checked August 2026). The certificate is free from Let’s Encrypt: “We do not charge a fee for our certificates.”
A fair fee is those parts plus named work. Every galloping.ai tier is a fully hosted, SEO-ready website, and the higher tiers add an agent that books meetings and monthly visibility checks. Extra pages, ads, and custom work are extras. No fee buys a rank.
What you are paying for each month, line by line
Ask for the bill broken out.
- Hosting. Free to about $5 a month for plain files. Managed WordPress hosting starts at $30 at WP Engine, $35 at Kinsta (their pricing pages, August 2026), and you need neither. Watch the teaser: Hostinger publishes $2.99 against a $10.99 renewal, with 48 months up front, SiteGround $2.99 against $17.99. The renewal is the real price.
- Domain. Gandi lists $11.00 to register against a $38.38 renewal on the same .com that Porkbun renews at $11.08. Check the renewal before you buy.
- Certificate. Free. Let’s Encrypt renews it every 60 days, so a separate SSL charge is a charge for nothing.
- Upkeep. Real work on WordPress. Patchstack counted 11,334 new problems in WordPress plugins and themes in 2025, up from 7,966 in 2024. 46% had no fix the day they went public. WordPress does not update most plugins on its own. WP Buffs charges $89 a month for updates and backups, $179 with edits. We carry no plugins, so upkeep means backups, uptime checks and fixing what breaks.
- Content. Google’s guidance asks whether you are changing dates to look fresh, and answers “No, it won’t”. Pay by the page, for pages you needed.
- Listings. A Google Business Profile costs nothing. BrightLocal directory listings start around $2 each, one time per directory, not a monthly service.
- Reporting. Search Console is free, and Google says GA4 keeps 14 months of data on its free version. You are paying someone to read it and act, so the bill should name whose hours.
What the galloping.ai tiers include
Every tier includes a hosted, SEO-ready website and an agent on it that answers your visitors. What moves up the tiers is how far each part goes: five, ten, or fifteen written pages, whether the agent books straight onto your calendar, and whether we check what Google and ChatGPT say about you every month.
The monthly price does not include open-ended page work. A new page, ads, and other custom additions are priced separately.
One test still matters: every plan should name the work it includes. “Ongoing support” is not a line item you can check later.
Google’s Local Services Ads charge per lead, and Yelp lists ad budgets starting around $5 a day. Ad spend belongs on its own line, never inside the website fee.
The pricing page lists all three tiers. The Agents page explains the agent that answers visitors and books meetings, and the crew behind it.
Why a web company charges monthly, and when to walk away
Monthly is fair when it buys work a person does every month. It is rent when the site is paid for and nobody touches it.
Two patterns should end the conversation. First, a monthly fee with no itemized work. Ask what happens in month four. If they cannot name it, nothing happens in month four. Second, a deal where cancelling costs you the site. Ask three questions in writing. Whose name is on the domain registration? Who holds the logins? Do I get the files if I leave?
People type “website held hostage by web designer” into Google, which tells you how common this is.
Our sites build to a plain folder of files you can host anywhere. A domain moves with a transfer code from your registrar, after a 60-day wait on a new registration.
What we charge, and what is not in it
Our pricing page shows all three current tier prices, what each includes, and which work stays separate.
Not included: ad spend, paid directory fees, and any promise about rank. If we buy something for you, you see the receipt.
Any extra work is scoped separately before it starts, and nothing goes live until you approve it. We do not publish client results, so the build we can show you in full is our own (/websites).
What a monthly plan will not do for you
Google states there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking (support.google.com/business/answer/7091). Anyone selling one is selling weather.
Google also says some changes take hours and others take months, and to wait a few weeks before judging work. No plan can date a result, ours included.
Run pagespeed.web.dev on your own site and write the number down. It is a lab test, and Google’s docs separate lab scores from real visitor data, so read it as a starting point and not a verdict.
Approval takes your time, a few minutes a week, every week. Nothing here answers your phone.
The free scan at /scan asks AI the questions your customers ask and tells you what to fix first. Start the request by email. Email is the default, and you can ask for a call.