Running a plumber website costs about a dollar a month if you own it, $17 to $37 on a builder plan, or $199 with someone maintaining it — every price read on 16 September 2026

“How much does a plumber website cost” has a page-one answer, and it is the build: this site’s own arithmetic is in what a plumber should pay for a website. The follow-up question — and then what does it cost me every month? — gets answered by whoever is selling the plan. Wix quotes Wix. GoDaddy quotes GoDaddy. A web designer with a maintenance retainer quotes the retainer. None of them adds up the whole bill for a business that just wants the site to stay online and the form to keep arriving.

So this page does the adding, from the vendors’ own purchase pages, all read on the same day, with the routes side by side. Where a price could not be read that day, the page says so rather than guessing.

The four routes and what each costs a month

Route	Monthly cost	What you own	Where the number comes from
Own a static site, host it free	About $1 (domain only); about $8 with one mailbox	Everything	$11.08 a year for a .com at Porkbun, free hosting on Cloudflare Pages, $7 a user for Google Workspace Starter (porkbun.com, cloudflare.com, workspace.google.com, read 16 September 2026)
Rent a builder plan	$17 to $37, plus a mailbox	Your content and domain; not the site itself, which stops when the plan does	Wix Light $17 a month, Core $29.77, yearly and paid in full; GoDaddy Website Builder “as low as $9.99” a month on an annual term (wix.com, godaddy.com, read 16 September 2026)
Pay off the build monthly	$149 for twelve months, then $0	The site, code, content and domain at month twelve	The Own It plan on our web design page; hosting, updates and edits included for the twelve months
Managed care plan	$199	Everything, with someone else holding the keys to the hosting	Our Care Plan: managed hosting and security, monthly edits, uptime and performance monitoring

The spread is the point. The same plumber site can cost a dollar a month or two hundred, and the difference is not the site — it is who is responsible for it when something breaks, and whether the arrangement ends with you owning anything. Each line below is one route, with the receipt.

The domain: about a dollar a month

A .com at Porkbun is $11.08 a year, and its pricing page says “the price you see is the price you pay, year after year” with no first-year discount that jumps at renewal (porkbun.com/tld/com, read 16 September 2026). Divided by twelve that is 92 cents a month, and it is the one cost every route shares, because a domain is the thing you own whatever hosts the site. Registrars differ; I tried to read GoDaddy’s and Namecheap’s domain pages the same day and both refused the request, so their renewal prices are not quoted here. Check yours, and check the renewal price rather than the first-year one.

If you take nothing else from this page: register the domain in your own account, in your own name. Who owns your website and domain explains how to check, and why it matters more than any monthly figure below.

Hosting: free for a static site, with one sentence to read first

A plumber’s site is a handful of pages, a form and a phone number. Built as static files — which is how we build — it needs no server to run, and two of the largest hosts will serve it for nothing. Cloudflare’s Workers and Pages page says “all plans come with unlimited sites, seats, requests, and bandwidth” and “start building for free — no credit card required”; its Pages limits page gives the free plan 500 builds a month (cloudflare.com/products/pages/ and developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/limits/, both read 16 September 2026). Five hundred builds is five hundred edits; a plumber will not get near it.

GitHub Pages is the other free host, and it carries a sentence worth reading before you use it for a business. It is “available in public repositories with GitHub Free”, with a published site “no larger than 1 GB”, a “soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month” and a “soft limit of 10 builds per hour” — and its terms say it is “not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service” (docs.github.com … about-github-pages and … github-pages-limits, read 16 September 2026). A brochure site with a quote form is not an e-commerce site or a software product, but that is GitHub’s sentence to interpret, not mine, and I would rather you read it than take my word. Cloudflare’s page carries no such clause.

What the free hosts do not include is anyone watching the site. If the form breaks at 2 a.m. nobody will tell you, which is the gap the care plan below exists to fill — and it is fine to fill it yourself by sending a test enquiry once a month.

Builders: $17 to $37 a month, on annual terms

If the site lives inside a builder, the builder’s plan is the hosting. Wix’s plans page, read from Grand Rapids on 16 September 2026, shows Light at $17 a month, Core at $29.77 and Business at $39.77, and states that “displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions, paid in full at the time of purchase” and that “prices and currency vary by location” (wix.com/plans). Light is the one that connects your own domain and removes Wix’s branding; each paid plan includes a free domain for the first year, and the page does not state what that domain costs to renew, so I have not. GoDaddy’s plans page lists its Website Builder “as low as $9.99 a month” with “33% savings with an annual term”, and Managed Hosting for WordPress “as low as $14.99 a month” (godaddy.com/websites/website-builder/plans-and-pricing, read 16 September 2026). “As low as” means the annual term at the lowest tier; the monthly-term price is higher and was not displayed.

Squarespace is missing from this list on purpose. Its pricing page, opened the same day, rendered the plan names and the annual-versus-monthly toggle but no figures that could be read as text, and I am not going to quote a price from memory. If you are choosing Squarespace, read the number on the page yourself and note whether the toggle is on annual.

The thing to understand about every builder figure is what stops when you stop paying. Your domain and your text are yours. The site — the pages, the layout, the form — is the plan, and it goes dark with it. That is not wrong, it is what renting is, but it is why the “about a dollar” route and the “$17 to $37” route are not the same product at different prices.

Email on your own domain: $7 a mailbox

Google Workspace’s pricing page lists Business Starter at $7 per user per month, with a 50%-off-for-three-months introduction showing on the read and an annual-commitment toggle on the page (workspace.google.com/pricing, read 16 September 2026). One mailbox is enough for most one-crew plumbers. It is optional — a free Gmail address costs nothing — but the quote form on a site called yourplumbing.com arriving at a yourplumbing.com address is the small thing that makes a business look like a business, and $7 is what it costs.

A dollar a month buys a site that stays up. Two hundred buys someone whose job it is to notice when it does not.

Maintenance: $199 a month, and what it is actually for

Our Care Plan is $199 a month for managed hosting and security, monthly edits and updates, and uptime and performance monitoring. It is optional on every build, and a static site can be handed to you to host free instead — that is written on the pricing, not a concession. What the plan buys is not hosting, which the table above shows is close to free; it is that someone else finds out first when the form stops arriving, the certificate lapses or a script slows the page down, and that the “change the hours for the holiday” email gets done without a quote. Does website speed matter has an example of exactly the kind of drift a plan is for: one script cost this site 24 points.

There is also the route where the monthly figure is the build. The Starter Site on our web design page can be paid as $149 a month for twelve months instead of $999 up front; hosting, updates and edits are included for those twelve months, and at the twelfth payment it stops and the site — code, content and domain — is yours. Stop early and the site comes down, we hold it for 90 days, and the buy-out stays open. That is a payment plan with an end, which is the thing to check on any monthly website offer: the handover checklist lists what you should be holding on the day it ends.

What to budget, by situation

Your situation	Budget a month	The catch to check
You own a static site and are comfortable sending yourself a test enquiry monthly	About $1, or about $8 with a mailbox	Somebody has to notice a broken form; on GitHub Pages, read the commercial-use sentence first
You want to build and edit it yourself in a builder	$17 to $37, plus a mailbox	Annual terms paid up front; the site is the plan, and ends with it
You would rather never think about it	$199	Check that the domain is in your name and that leaving the plan does not mean losing the site
You are paying off the build monthly	$149 for twelve months, then your choice of the rows above	Make sure the plan ends and the site transfers; ours does at month twelve

What this page does not prove

• One day’s prices. Every figure was read on 16 September 2026 and vendors change plans without notice. Two showed promotions on the read (Wix’s “save 50%” badges on its higher tiers; Workspace’s three-month discount), and the underlying prices are what is quoted.
• Two vendors unread. Squarespace’s figures did not render as readable text; GoDaddy’s and Namecheap’s domain pages refused the request. None is quoted, and none should be filled in from memory.
• Location. Wix says its prices vary by location; these are the ones shown to a Grand Rapids visitor. Taxes are excluded everywhere.
• Not included in any route: the build itself, photography, ad spend, call tracking, a booking tool, or any paid app you connect. Those are separate decisions and separate pages; the contractor website page lists what a build does and does not include.

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