What a plumber website costs, line by line

The five lines behind one plumbing website

Domain, hosting and the shop email address

The cheap line, and the one with the widest gap between the price you are shown and the price you pay. A domain is $10 to $20 a year at list price — GoDaddy lists a .com at $22.99 a year plus about twenty cents of ICANN fee — and a one-dollar first year is a discount, not a price. Hosting is priced by type rather than by trade: shared is $2 to $10 a month, WordPress hosting $3 to $25 with managed tiers passing $200, a VPS $10 to $100, a dedicated server $80 to $500. One plumber-specific breakdown quotes the whole span as $3 to $250 a month, which tells you how little the trade narrows it. A builder plan replaces this line rather than adding to it: Squarespace publishes $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing ($25, $39, $65 and $139 month to month), and Wix publishes $19.77, $29.77, $39.77 and $159.77 on a yearly subscription paid in full, with a free tier at $0 — so $228 to $1,188 a year at the $19-to-$99 ends. Then the line most quotes leave out: a business email address on your own domain is $6 to $14 per user per month, $72 to $168 a year for one. HTTPS should not be its own charge, and a quote carrying $0 to $200 a year for SSL is billing you for the host’s own automation.

The build

The widest line on the page, because “a plumber website” describes several different purchases. A freelancer or small agency building a semi-custom site — five to fifteen service pages, basic local SEO — is $1,500 to $4,500 one-time. A second, independent read of the same market puts a freelancer build at $2,000 to $6,000 upfront with $20 to $60 a month of hosting and maintenance attached, and that monthly half is the part that vanishes when somebody lays it next to a one-off quote. A custom agency build is $5,000 to $15,000 and up; two independent sources landed on the same range, and one of them attaches a $100 to $500 monthly retainer to it. Doing it yourself on a builder is $16 to $50 a month all in, roughly $200 to $500 for the year including the domain; doing it yourself on self-hosted WordPress is $20 to $60 a month plus $0 to $500 of plugins upfront. Those are four different products rather than four bids on one job. Page count is what separates them, and specifically how many pages are one-service-one-town pages — the emergency drain unblocking page for each place you actually drive to is the work, and it is why a fifteen-page quote is not one and a half times a ten-page quote.

The software the booking ships inside

The line a plumbing business has that a bakery does not, and the useful thing to say about it is that online booking is not a separate purchase to price at all. It ships inside the job-management software you were already going to buy. Jobber includes online booking on every tier and publishes Core at $21 a month prepaid annually ($49 with no commitment), Connect $70 ($139), Grow $105 ($199, ten users) and Plus $280 ($499, fifteen users), with extra users at $29 a month. Housecall Pro publishes Basic at $59 a month on annual billing ($79 monthly, one user), Essentials $149 ($189, five users) and Max $299 ($329, eight users), with card processing starting at 2.59% and bank payments at 1%. Both are the vendors’ own pricing pages, which makes them the two firmest figures anywhere on this page. Annualised, that is $252 to $3,360 on Jobber and $708 to $3,588 on Housecall Pro — so against a $5,000 agency build, the software passes the website in eighteen months on the top tier and takes twenty years on the bottom one. On a Naratake site the Plumbing & HVAC starting point opens with a 24/7 emergency banner, photo quotes and a job tracker, and you add the booking and quote-request blocks to the page yourself. Quote requests, bookings and online ordering go live on a published site on Storefront Pro — $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them. Card payments use your own live Stripe keys, so the money lands in your account rather than passing through ours, and we take no share of it. The pricing page has the rest.

Photographs, and a page per service

A session covering your own vans, your own crew and your own finished work is $300 to $1,500, and it is the line that most separates a real plumbing site from a template. Somebody deciding whether to let a stranger into the house at eleven at night is looking for a face and a marked van, not a stock photograph of a wrench. The words are priced per page: copywriting runs $50 to $500 a page, so the ten service-and-town pages a shop actually wants found is $500 to $5,000 of copy, and a twenty-page list is $1,000 to $10,000. That is why the build fee and the content budget are usually two separate conversations, and why the second one is sometimes the larger. None of it is needed to open. Five pages — what you fix, what a service call costs, who turns up, which towns you cover, and how to reach you at 2am — will carry a shop through its first year.

Keeping it current, and the bill for being found

Two recurring lines, both usually larger than the site. First, changes: edits outside a maintenance plan are billed at $50 to $150 an hour, and plugin and app renewals are $100 to $500 a year. Ask what one change costs before you sign rather than after — a service-call price nobody wants to pay $150 to edit is a price that goes stale, and a stale price is an argument on a doorstep. Second, being found: call tracking is $30 to $100 a month and review management $50 to $150, which is $960 to $3,000 a year for the two before anybody buys an advert. Then the pay-per-lead marketplaces, which are this trade’s answer to a platform commission except that they charge per lead rather than a percentage of the job. A plumbing lead is quoted at $40 to $85 on Angi Leads on top of roughly $300 a year of membership, and $30 to $65 on Thumbtack, rising to $95 for an emergency call. Treat those two as the softest figures here: neither marketplace publishes a per-trade rate card, and the write-ups that do are run by firms selling lead-response tooling. The structure is firmer than the decimal, and the structure is the expensive part — the same lead is resold to three to eight contractors on Angi and shown to four or five on Thumbtack, so cost-per-lead badly understates cost-per-booked-job. At one in four, a $40 to $85 lead is $160 to $340 on every job you win. Reported spend runs from a $400-a-month minimum on Angi, $4,800 a year, to $100 to $2,000 and up a month on Thumbtack. Two exits worth knowing if you would rather stop paying and keep what you have: Storefront Pro includes the source download, and the desktop LocalSite Studio is a one time payment with no monthly fee that exports the project as often as you like. Either way the test is the same — can you change your service-call fee yourself, on a phone, between jobs?

Three routes to the same plumbing page

A builder subscription

One plan, one bill, hosting and the certificate included. Squarespace publishes $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month on annual billing — $25, $39, $65 and $139 month to month — and Wix publishes $19.77, $29.77, $39.77 and $159.77 on a yearly subscription paid in full, with a free tier at $0. Priced all in with a domain, the DIY builder tier for a plumber is $16 to $50 a month, about $200 to $500 for the year. Naratake works this way too: 40 industry starting points, of which the Plumbing & HVAC one opens with a 24/7 emergency banner, photo quotes and a job tracker, plus 15 design styles, 111 components and 66 color sets to make it yours. Every cloud plan connects one custom domain, and published sites are served over HTTPS with nothing for you to install. What no builder solves on its own is dispatch: a slot picker is only worth having if the times it offers come from a real schedule, and that schedule lives in the job software. The other trade is that the platform sets the ceiling, so read what your plan covers before you commit; ours is on the pricing page.

Hiring a freelancer or an agency

You are buying judgment and hours, and $1,500 to $15,000 and up is the distance between mostly hours and mostly judgment. Get two numbers, never one: the build fee, and the price of changing your service-call fee, adding a service or adding a town afterward — out-of-plan edits are $50 to $150 an hour, and an agency retainer is $100 to $500 a month. A shop that adds a town or drops a service twice a year will still be paying that second number in year three, so it is the one to negotiate. Ask three more things before the deposit: whose name the domain is registered in, who holds the hosting login, and whether the site comes with you if you leave. The answers should be yours, yours, and yes.

Building it yourself

Self-hosted WordPress is $20 to $60 a month with hosting, plus $0 to $500 of plugins upfront and $100 to $500 a year to renew them; a builder subscription is $16 to $50 a month all in. The cash is genuinely small either way: $200 to $500 for the year on a builder, and $240 to $1,220 on WordPress once hosting and a first round of plugins are in. The cost is your hours, and a first site is never quick: budget fifteen to forty of them, with photography counted separately. Price those hours the way you price a job. Fifteen hours out of a quiet January is the cheapest website on this page. Fifteen hours out of a week you could have been billing service calls is the most expensive one.

What you can strike off the quote

• A seat for everybody on the payroll. Job software is priced by user — Jobber Grow includes ten and Plus fifteen, with extra users at $29 a month; Housecall Pro Basic is one user, Essentials five and Max eight. The people who need a login are the ones who look at the schedule on a phone. An apprentice who rides along and an office half-day do not each need one, and $29 a month for a seat nobody opens is $348 a year.
• Every lead marketplace switched on at once. A lead resold to three to eight contractors is not a lead you are alone on, and at $40 to $85 on Angi or $30 to $65 on Thumbtack you are charged whether or not the job is yours. That is a fair price for an empty week in February and a poor one for a week you were already turning work away. Switch it on for the gaps, and price it against a full diary rather than against zero.
• A page for every service before anybody has read one. Copy is $50 to $500 a page, so a twenty-service list is $1,000 to $10,000 written on a guess. Publish the five your phone already rings about, watch which of them get read, and buy the sixth when a customer asks for it.
• Charges that should not be on the quote at all. SSL as its own line at $0 to $200 a year, when the certificate has been free and renewed automatically by the host for a decade. A dedicated server at $80 to $500 a month behind a five-page site, when shared hosting is $2 to $10. And a guaranteed search ranking: nobody controls the results, so nobody can promise a position. What actually gets a plumber found is duller than any package makes it sound — a Google Business Profile with the right hours, real photographs of the van, and a phone number that is tappable on the first screen.

Questions people ask about the price