How much does a website cost in Houston?

$497, one time, for a three-page website. $10 a month to keep it online.

That is the whole answer for most Houston businesses, and we put it at the top of the page because everybody else makes you get on a call to hear it.

If you want us to keep working on the site after it launches — more pages, getting you found on Google, keeping the phone ringing — that runs $247, $747 or $1,247 a month. Those plans have no build fee at all. The site is included in the monthly.

You will notice those numbers are a fraction of what most Houston agencies quote. That is not a mistake and it is not a trial rate. Section 3 explains exactly where the difference goes, because a price this far below the going rate deserves an explanation and not a sales pitch.

A website you own outright: $497

You pay once. You get a three-page site, built for your business, live on your own domain.

Then it is $10 a month to host it. That covers the server, the security certificate, backups, and three changes a year — new hours, a new photo, a price that moved, a staff member who left. Changes past those three are $50 each. Extra pages are $147 apiece.

There is no setup fee on top of the $497 and there is no deposit.

The build takes one to three business days once we have your content — what you do, the areas you serve, your hours, your phone number and any photographs you already have.

What "three pages" actually means

A page is one thing you can be found for.

Google can only send somebody to a page. It cannot send them to a paragraph. If you fix air conditioners and you also do heating, and both of those sit in a list halfway down your home page, Google has one page to work with and it is about neither. Two pages, and there are two doors into your business.

So three pages is usually: who you are, the main thing you do, and how to reach you. That is enough for a business that gets its work by word of mouth and needs somewhere to send people.

What you own on day one — including the code

The website and its source code. The domain. The words and photos on it. If we set up a phone number or collect reviews for you, those are yours too, along with the list of customers who came through.

From day one, on every plan. Not on completion, not after a term.

The monthly fee buys the service — maintenance, edits, hosting, and the domain if we are carrying it for you. It does not buy the code, because the code is already yours.

So if you stop paying, your site does not go dark. You keep the website and we hand you the code, and you do not have to ask for it. Take it to any developer and they can carry on working on it.

Most of this industry does the reverse: the site is switched off, or the code is retained, and the switching cost is the point. We think that is shady, so we do not do it.

If you want to be found, not just findable

A $497 site does its job when somebody types your name in. That is a real job, and for plenty of businesses it is the only one that needs doing.

Getting found by people who do not know your name yet is different work, and it does not finish. It is more pages, month after month, each one aimed at something a person actually types. It is your Google Business Profile kept current. It is reviews coming in steadily instead of in one panicked burst before a big month.

That work is what the monthly plans are.

The three plans

Found — $247 a month. Five pages. Your Google Business Profile set up and maintained, reviews handled, and the site kept current. For a business that needs to exist properly in Houston search and not much more.

Chosen — $747 a month. Twelve pages. Everything in Found, plus the pages that win a comparison — service pages, neighbourhood pages, the questions people ask right before they call. For a business up against four or five others who all look about the same online.

Booked — $1,247 a month. Twenty-five pages. Everything in Chosen, at the scale where you are covering a whole city instead of a corner of it, and the work moves from being found to keeping the calendar full.

Every plan includes the website. There is no build fee on any of them — you are not paying $497 and then a monthly bill on top of it.

The two add-ons

Google Ads management — $697 a month, flat. That is our fee. What you spend on the ads goes straight to Google and is yours to set. We do not take a percentage of your ad spend, which means we have no reason to talk you into spending more.

Social+ — $97 a month. Posts going out steadily so your profiles are not three years stale when somebody checks. It is $97 on Found and it is included with Chosen and Booked.

The terms, in one paragraph

Three-month minimum, because month one is setup, month two is the first real work, and month three is where you start seeing whether it moved. Nothing meaningful in search happens faster than that, and we would rather say so than take your money for thirty days and hand you a shrug. After the third month you can stop any time and it ends at the end of that billing month. If you need out before month three is up, you pay half of what is left and we part on good terms. No setup fee, no deposit, no contract that renews itself while you are not looking.

What Houston actually quotes

Search this question and the pages that come back quote $5,000 to $15,000 for a small business website. The cheaper end of the market — the shops positioning themselves as the affordable alternative — lands around $1,500 to $3,000.

So we are roughly a third of the cheapest alternative and a tenth of the common one. If that makes you suspicious, good. Here is where the money goes in those quotes, and why it does not go there in ours.

A $5,000 quote is mostly not the website

Some of it is. Most of it is not.

It pays for the people who sold it to you. A quote that size usually arrives after a discovery call, a proposal, a follow-up call and a pitch deck. That is real labour by real people and it is billed into the project, whether the proposal wins or loses. We do not have a sales team, so you are not paying for one. The price is on this page instead of in a deck.

It pays for an office and an account manager. We are small on purpose. There is no layer between the person who builds your site and you.

It pays for the whole margin at once. An agency that builds you a site and never hears from you again has to make its entire year out of that one invoice. Our monthly plans mean we do not — which is exactly why those plans have no build fee. The site is a beginning for us, not a payday.

It pays for starting from scratch. We have built this kind of site many times over. The structure, the speed work, the search setup and the security baseline are already solved, so your build is us fitting a known method to your business rather than inventing one on your budget.

What that money does buy, honestly

We are not going to pretend a $5,000 agency is selling you nothing.

That price can buy brand strategy, real customer research, a photographer on site, a designer who starts from a blank page, and integrations with software you already run. Those are genuine things and some businesses need them. If yours does, spend the money — you will get something we are not selling.

What we are selling is a fast, clear, honest site that gets a local business found and called, built properly, priced so the decision is easy. For most Houston businesses that is the entire job.

The check you can run on us

We would rather you verify this than believe it.

Every site we have built is public and you can open any of them. Load one on your phone and see how fast it is. Look at whether it says anything true about the business or just fills space. Then load whatever a $5,000 quote produced for somebody you know, and compare.

We also publish which of our work was paid and which was built on spec, because a portfolio that tells you what it is beats one that does not.

Pick by what is actually wrong

Nobody can find you when they already know your name. The $497 site. Somebody hears about you, searches you, finds nothing — or finds a Facebook page from 2019. Solved once.

People find you but they pick somebody else. Chosen. The work there is the pages that answer the question somebody has right before they choose.

Nobody is looking for you by name yet. Found or Booked, depending on how much of Houston you want to reach. Slowest to pay off, and the only thing that changes how many people know you exist.

You need the phone ringing this month. That is ads, not a website — and for some trades they are the fastest money in the business while for others they are a way to donate to Google. Say so when you call and we will tell you which one you are.

None of the above. We are not the right shop for an online store with a thousand products, a booking system wired into software you already run, or an app. We would rather point you elsewhere than take a job we would do badly. If you are not sure which side of that line you are on, ask — it costs you a phone call.

Ask us what yours would cost

You already have the prices, so there is nothing to pull out of you on a call. Tell us what you do and where in Houston you do it, and we will tell you which one fits.

Call or text (832) 271-0547
Email trent@signalgrowthiq.com

We work with businesses across the Houston area.