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The Economics of a Smart Website
Three honest ways to price the same work: hire it out piece by piece, do it yourself at night, or bundle it. Adjust the numbers to your business and check our math.
25 hrs
of your month back, every month
+$3,300
/mo in extra revenue potential
5.9x
return on every dollar of the $900/mo plan
ROI = (what this work costs to hire out + conservative extra revenue) ÷ plan price. Your hours back are on top of that, not counted in it.
Hire it out piecemeal
- Smart website build (financed over 24 months)$250
- Hosting, security, updates & site maintenance$100
- Missed-call text-back + instant lead follow-up software$200
- Traffic & SEO reporting$80
- Site edits (2 per month, freelancer rates)$150
- Weekly blog posts (4/mo, freelance writer)$700
- Review management (requests + responses to every review)$150
- Google Business Profile management & posting$150
- Keyword expansion & new service-area pages$250
2.3x the bundle price, and you manage 9 vendors.
Do it yourself
- Hosting, security, updates & site maintenance2 hrs
- Missed-call text-back + instant lead follow-up software3 hrs
- Traffic & SEO reporting1 hrs
- Weekly blog posts (4/mo, freelance writer)12 hrs
- Review management (requests + responses to every review)2 hrs
- Google Business Profile management & posting2 hrs
- Keyword expansion & new service-area pages3 hrs
- Website build & editsyour weekends
4.2x the bundle price in your own time, done after the day job.
Skill Mammoth
- Every line item in both columns, one team
- Easy Start: you own the website outright at term
- No contracts on support plans
- One number, one throat to choke
vs $2,030 piecemeal or 25 hours of your month.
Now add what it makes you
Everything above is money you stop spending. This is new money coming in, estimated from your inputs and kept deliberately conservative.
Extra revenue
Speed to lead
You miss roughly 20 calls a month. Missed-call text-back answers every one in under a minute. If that recovers just one booked job a month, that's an extra:
+$1,200/mo
Extra revenue
Compounding SEO
Weekly posts, GBP activity, and new service-area pages typically add ~5 organic leads/mo by month six. At your 35% close rate, that's an extra:
+$2,100/mo
Put together: an estimated +$3,300/mo in new revenue on top of the $2,030/mo of work the $900/mo plan replaces. The famous lead-response research behind the speed-to-lead line: Harvard Business Review found firms that contacted leads within an hour were about seven times more likely to qualify them than those that waited even an hour longer. Most contractors respond in hours, if at all. A website that texts back in under a minute wins those jobs by default.
When this is NOT worth it
If your crew is booked solid for months and you can't hire, do not buy demand generation; the $900 plan would be wasted on you. Take the $500 plan for the time savings and the missed-call safety net, or take neither and come back when you can absorb the work. An honest no now beats a churned client later.
Want this breakdown with your numbers in it?
We'll email you the line-item math you built above, plus what we'd do first for a hvac business your size.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the market prices in this calculator come from?
Typical published rates: freelance blog writers run $150 to $250 per post, missed-call text-back software resells for $97 to $297 a month on its own, website care plans run about $99 a month, GBP management services charge $99 to $300, and freelance service pages cost $200 to $400 each. We rounded to single conservative numbers, and every line is listed so you can swap in quotes you've actually received.
Is the revenue upside guaranteed?
No, and treat any agency that guarantees it as a red flag. The upside section uses your own average job value and close rate with deliberately conservative assumptions, like recovering a single missed call per month. The cost comparison above it doesn't depend on the upside at all; the bundle is cheaper than buying the pieces even if the upside were zero.
What's the difference between the $500 and $900 plans?
Both include the Easy Start website ($150/mo toward owning your site outright) plus a support plan. At $500 the Essentials plan covers hosting, security, lead automations, reporting, and monthly edits. At $900 the Growth plan adds weekly blog posts, review management, Google Business Profile posting, and keyword expansion, which is where the compounding SEO work lives.