For plumbing companies

What a plumbing website
actually costs.

Every agency wants a call before they will say a number. Here is the number instead. The three bands the whole market falls into, what separates them, what gets added to the invoice later, and what I charge. If you want, I will then build a working demo of your own site for free, and you decide after you have used it.

The demo is a real page you can click through, chat with, and book a time on.

The market

Three bands. Every quote
you have been given is in one.

The quotes look random because "plumbing website" describes three different products sold under one name. Once you know which one is on the table, the price stops being a mystery.

Band one
$0 to $500
Plus a monthly builder fee

A template you set up yourself on Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy. Pick a layout, drop in a photo of a wrench, add your number. An afternoon of work and it does look tidy.

What you are really buyingA business card that happens to be online. Fine if every job you get comes from repeat customers and referrals. It will not answer anybody at midnight.
Band two
$1,500 to $5,000
One time, sometimes plus hosting

A freelancer or small shop builds it around your business. Your van, your service area, separate pages for drains, water heaters and repipes. Most established plumbing companies sit here.

What you are really buyingA far better shopfront. Whether it turns into booked work still depends on what was wired behind the contact form, and that part is almost never itemised.
Band three
$8,000 and up
Plus a monthly retainer

The full stack. Site, tracked numbers, dispatch software integration, review automation, ad landing pages, a dashboard. Nearly always sold with management on top.

What you are really buyingA lead system. It makes sense when you are running several vans and already paying for leads. For a two van shop it is a lot of machinery to feed.
What drives it

The price is decided
at two in the morning.

Plumbing is the trade where the website has the least time to work. A burst supply line does not wait for office hours, and the person standing in it is not reading your about page.

They have their phone in one hand and a towel in the other. They will tap the first number they see, and if it rings out they will tap the next one, and the job is gone in under a minute. That is a real emergency call, worth many times a drain clearing, lost because nobody picked up.

So the money in a plumbing build is not spent on how the page looks. It is spent on making sure that a person who arrives at 2am gets an answer of some kind.

The number has to be the first thing. On a phone, above the fold, tappable. It sounds obvious. Open the sites of your three nearest competitors and count how many make you scroll for it.
What happens when nobody answers. You are under a sink with gloves on. Whether that missed call gets an instant text back is the single biggest difference between a cheap plumbing site and an expensive one.
After hours capture. A form that emails you is useless at midnight. Something that replies immediately, tells them when you can come, and holds the job until morning is a different build.
Emergency and routine are two visitors. One wants a number now, one wants a price for a water heater and will compare three companies. A site that serves both costs more than a site that only serves one.
Reviews feeding the map. For "plumber near me" almost all the clicks go to the map results above the page listings. That is your Google profile and your recent reviews, so a site that helps collect them earns its keep twice.
Trust in a stranger you let indoors. Licence number, insurance, real faces, real vans. A homeowner is deciding whether to unlock the door for you, and generic stock photos work against that.
Before you sign

The four questions
that change the price.

Ask these of every quote on your desk, mine included. The answers move the real cost far more than the headline figure does.

1
Is after hours handling included or extra? This is the part that matters most in plumbing and the part most often left out of the price. Get it answered before you compare two quotes.
2
Whose phone number is on the site? If they put a tracking number on it, find out who owns it. When you leave, a number that is not yours can walk out of the door with your call history.
3
What does a change cost after launch? New service, new suburb, a price update on water heaters. If every small edit is billable, a cheap build stops being cheap by month four.
4
Who owns the domain and the Google profile? Both should be registered in your name, not in the name of the agency. Recovering them later from an agency you have parted with is the expensive kind of mistake.
Free, before anything
See yours built
before you pay.

Judging a website from a proposal is guesswork. So I do it backwards: I build a working plumbing site with your company name on it, you use it on your own phone, and money only comes up after that.

Build my free plumbing demo
  • A real page you can scroll and tap, not a picture of one.
  • The chat assistant handles a blocked drain enquiry the way it would handle yours.
  • It offers appointment times and takes the booking, so you can see where a lead lands.
  • No card, no discovery call, no contract to sign first.
  • If it is not what you want, nothing happens. It cost you a click.
The arithmetic

Work it out with
your own numbers.

Agency pages like to tell you a website is an investment rather than an expense. That is a comfortable thing to say about money that is not theirs, so do the sum yourself with numbers I do not have.

Start with the profit you keep on one emergency call out, not the invoice total. Divide the price of the website by it. That is how many extra call outs a year the site has to produce before it has paid for itself. For most plumbing companies that number is small enough to be uncomfortable to look at.

Now the half nobody does. Count what you already lose: the calls that rang out while you were under a sink, the after hours voicemails you heard at seven the next morning, the quote requests you meant to chase on Sunday. You already paid to attract those people. Catching them is cheaper than buying new ones, and it is exactly what gets left off most quotes.

If both numbers come out small, do not buy anything yet. That is a legitimate answer, and it is the reason the demo costs nothing.

Compare it against your other lead costs. Ads, a lead app, a directory listing, the hours you spend chasing referrals. The website competes with those, not with zero.
A free site is not free. The evenings you spend fiddling with it, and the calls it never captured, are the bill you never receive.
Nobody can promise you a figure. Anyone quoting you an exact return on a site they have not built yet is guessing, and it tells you how to read the rest of their quote.
Measure enquiries, not compliments. Three months in the only question is whether more people are contacting you and whether fewer are getting lost. The rest is taste.
What I charge

No quote needed.
Here it is.

Start at the bottom and move up only when the website is genuinely the thing holding you back. Most plumbing companies never need band three.

Review Machine
$99/mo
Keep your site, fix the reviews
  • Review request after every job
  • Sent by text and email, with a follow up
  • One tap through to your Google page
  • Works with the website you already have
See how it works
Most plumbers start here
Starter
$297/mo
Site and follow up, built for you
  • A plumbing website built and hosted
  • Missed call text back
  • Automated review requests
  • Online booking
  • Monthly report
Start with a free demo
Custom System
$3,000+
One time, plus $297/mo hosting
  • Everything in Starter
  • Fully custom design, and the site is yours
  • Longer follow up sequences
  • Ready for Google Ads traffic
Talk it through

There is a larger managed package as well. It is on the main page, and most plumbing companies reading this do not need it yet.

Questions

Straight answers.

How much should a plumbing company spend on a website?
Enough that it catches the calls you are currently losing, and not a dollar more than that. A one van operation living off repeat customers does not need an eight thousand dollar build. A company running several vans and paying for leads is quietly losing more than that to a site that does not answer anybody after six. Start low, and move up only when the site is the bottleneck.
Why do plumbing websites cost more than an ordinary small business site?
The design is not the expensive part. The expensive part is what happens when somebody lands at two in the morning with water on the floor. Instant reply, missed call text back, after hours booking and call tracking are all real work to wire up, and they are what separates a fifteen hundred dollar site from a five thousand dollar one.
Do I need a separate page for every service?
Not on day one. Drain cleaning, water heaters, repipes and emergency work do each get searched separately, so separate pages help over time, but they also multiply the build. Start with your two highest value services and add pages once you can see which ones actually bring enquiries.
How long does a plumbing website take to build?
Around a week for a Starter build once I have your service area, your licence details and a few photos of your own work. A Custom System takes longer because more is wired behind it. The free demo is quicker than either, because it is built from what is already public about your company.
Will a new website put me at the top for "plumber near me"?
Not by itself, and anybody promising it is guessing. That search is dominated by the map results, which are driven by your Google Business Profile, your review count and how recent the reviews are. The website supports that and converts the visitors once they arrive. It does not replace it.
Can I see it before I pay anything?
Yes, that is the whole point of the free demo. You get a working plumbing site with your company name on it, including the chat assistant answering a customer, before any money changes hands or anything is signed. If you do not like it, that is the end of it.
Get started

Get your plumbing
demo built free.

Tell me about your company and I will build it, then message you on WhatsApp when it is ready to look at.

If you have one I will look at it first, so the demo is a straight comparison. If you do not, that is fine too.

No card. No contract. You see it before you decide.

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