Honest, industry-standard ranges for what you should pay, plus the agency red flags that mean you're about to get burned. From an agency that would rather tell you the truth than sell you a $99/mo lie.
The web design and SEO industry runs on confusion. Quotes range from $99 to $9,000 for things that sound identical, and plenty of that range is designed to take advantage of owners who can’t tell the difference. This tool gives you realistic, industry-standard ranges and the red flags that signal you’re about to get burned.
Web design scales with the size and complexity of the site and whether it’s custom-coded or a template. SEO scales with how competitive your market is, a small town is very different from a major metro. AI Search Optimization is usually layered on top. The ranges here reflect what legitimate, US-based providers actually charge for real work.
A $99/month SEO plan buys automated junk that does nothing, you pay for a year and rank nowhere. A bargain template site that’s slow and unoptimized costs you customers every month. Real work has a real cost, but it pays for itself. The goal isn’t the lowest price; it’s the best return.
Nothing here touches your website. The tool asks three questions: what you need, how competitive your market is, and how big your business is. The first answer decides which baseline ranges apply, a build, ongoing SEO or local SEO, AI search work, or all of it together. The other two set multipliers on those baselines, and the output is rounded so it reads cleanly. Market moves the number most, because a small town and a major metro are not the same amount of work, and a multi-location business carries more scope than a solo operator. The arithmetic runs in your browser as you tap the buttons. Your answers are not submitted or stored. The red-flag list under the result is fixed, not personalized.
The starting points are the prices already published on this site, not figures invented for a calculator. Custom website builds run $3,500 to $12,000+ one-time. Ongoing SEO or local SEO runs $1,500 to $3,500 per month for most businesses, and $3,500 to $7,500 per month in competitive metros or multi-location work, which is roughly what the market and size buttons are doing when you move them. AI search optimization is priced from its own baseline rather than folded into the SEO figure. Everything is month-to-month with no long-term contract, and the client owns the site, the content, and the accounts, which is why the red-flag list treats a twelve-month lock-in as a warning sign.
What it cannot do is quote your project. It does not know your page count, how much content has to be written, whether you need a store or custom tools, what condition your current site is in, or what a particular agency in your city charges. It has no way of knowing what any budget produces either, and no honest tool would pretend otherwise. Use it to separate a reasonable quote from an unreasonable one, then read the detail in how much a website costs and how much SEO costs.
Because both answers change the amount of work, not just the price tag. A competitive metro means more competitors doing the same things well, which means more pages, more depth, and more upkeep to stay visible. Multi-location adds a separate set of pages, listings, and reporting for every location. The tool applies those as multipliers on the baseline rather than pretending one number fits every market.
No. It is an industry band produced from three broad answers, and a project can sit outside it for perfectly good reasons. A real number needs scope: how many pages, what has to be written, what has to be built, and what you already have that is worth keeping. That conversation costs nothing and needs no signup. Call or text <a href="tel:4076942055">(407) 694-2055</a>, or <a href="/free-mockup">ask for a free mockup or audit</a>.