Transparent pricing. No proposals. No retainers. Cancel anytime.
From one flat build fee to a site we actively keep ranking. Add on, downgrade, or cancel - whenever.
Up to 3 pages, hand-coded
Yours to keep. No subscription.
A real website. Built once. Owned by you.
$500 website + $100 CMS
Still one payment. Still no subscription.
Change your own copy without ringing a developer.
Cancel anytime
No contracts. No lock-in. Just results.
Keep the site current, useful, and ranking.
By Underdog Digital
Our agency arm. Same people, bigger scope.
When you need more. Proper SEO, properly scoped, aimed at winning the category.
The monthly plan is an add-on, not an alternative. Every client starts with a website they own outright. Ongoing SEO and content updates are for people who want the site actively worked on after launch - not a condition of buying one.
Already own a domain? Nothing changes. Send the login or add one DNS record, and the price stays $500.
Need one? Add it at cost. We register it in your name, connect it, and you go live on a domain you own.
Around $20 a year, at cost, on your invoice
Plenty of people show up with a business name and nothing else. That is the simplest version of this job. We check what is available, register it, point it at your site and configure DNS. You never open a registrar account or learn what a nameserver is.
The domain is registered in your name, not ours. Most registrars would let us hold it on your behalf, and plenty of agencies do - but a domain your web person controls is leverage, and this service exists specifically so nobody has leverage over you. You own the code, so you own the address it lives at.
It makes the answer to "what if this goes badly" boring: you take the files, you already hold the domain, you point it wherever you want. No transfer fee, no release process, no awkward conversation.
The registrar fee lands on your invoice at cost - around $20 a year for a .com. Renew it yourself, or let the monthly plan handle renewals and DNS so an expired domain never quietly takes your site offline.
Everything each tier includes. No asterisks, no "starting from", no discovery call to find out.
| Feature | Website$500 | Website + CMS$600 | SEO + Content$79/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 3 hand-coded pages | ✓ | ✓ | - |
| Custom design (no template) | ✓ | ✓ | - |
| Mobile-first responsive | ✓ | ✓ | - |
| PageSpeed 90+ at launch | ✓ | ✓ | Monitored |
| Working contact form | ✓ | ✓ | - |
| SEO + GEO foundations | ✓ | ✓ | Maintained |
| Schema markup + XML sitemap | ✓ | ✓ | Kept current |
| Hosting + SSL (no ongoing hosting fee) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full code ownership | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Two revision rounds after launch | ✓ | ✓ | - |
| 30 days post-launch support | ✓ | ✓ | Ongoing |
| Edit your own content | ✗ | ✓ | - |
| Ongoing SEO + content updates | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Search Console monitoring | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Monthly ranking report | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Content updates (30 min/month) | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Priority support, 24h response | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Price | $500 once | $600 once | $79/mo |
Three numbers in USD, flat, worldwide. Same price whether you are in Austin, Auckland, Toronto or Cape Town - we do not quote by postcode.
A $500 website is $500. Agencies quote $5,000 to $15,000 for the same three pages, and most of that gap is overhead: account managers, proposal decks, discovery calls, and office leases. None of it makes your site faster or easier to find. Hand-coded, no page builder, no 400kb of JavaScript to render three pages - PageSpeed 90+ is the baseline, not an upsell.
The $100 CMS add-on is there for owners who want to change their own copy without a developer in the loop. Simple Pages CMS fields over the same hand-coded site - no WordPress admin, no plugin maintenance, no licence that expires. Add it at purchase or years later at the same price.
Hosting is not a subscription. The site runs on our managed edge network with SSL and baseline security included in the build - there is no monthly fee to keep it online, and no year-two invoice to keep what you have already paid for. The one optional extra is the $79 monthly plan, and it is not hosting: it is active work - ongoing SEO, Search Console monitoring, Core Web Vitals tracking, and a monthly ranking report. Cancel any time, and you own every file, so leaving means we hand the code over - not that the site goes dark.
Payment is by card through Stripe in USD, and international cards are welcome. Work happens asynchronously, so time zones are not a problem - you are not booking calls, you are filling in a brief.
If $79 a month is not the right size for your ambitions - multi-market, multi-language, or a category where every competitor already runs an SEO retainer - that work sits with our agency, Underdog Digital. Full audits, content production and link acquisition, scoped to what you are actually trying to win. Plenty of businesses never need it. If you are trying to own a category, a maintenance plan will not get you there.
It is a bit like renting a mixer and a jackhammer from Home Depot for the weekend. The equipment is genuinely good. Whether you end up with a driveway or a mess is still on you.
You can build a website yourself now. Lovable, Bolt, v0 - they are real tools and we are not going to pretend they are junk. If that sounds fun and you have a weekend, go for it. We would rather tell you that than take $500 from someone who did not need to spend it.
Two things worth knowing first. The cost is not zero and it never stops: the cheapest Lovable plan that lets you use a custom domain is $25 a month, billed forever. Over five years that is roughly $1,500 - and the month you stop paying is the month your site becomes a problem. Ours is $500 once. Leave it live for ten years and you never pay us again.
The second thing is that the tool does not know SEO. It will build something that looks great and ranks nowhere - because ranking is schema, internal linking, Core Web Vitals, search intent, and two decades of knowing which of those actually moves a local service business. None of that is in the prompt box. It is the part you are actually paying for.
So: if the weekend build appeals, use the tools. If you want it done once, done properly, and never thought about again, that is us.
about $1,500 over five years. You keep paying, or it becomes a problem.
Go and try LovablePaid once, owned forever, built by someone who has done SEO for twenty years.
Why this costs what it costsPay, fill in the brief, and we start building. Everything else is optional and always will be.
$500 covers a custom, hand-coded website of up to three pages, responsive design, a working contact form, technical SEO foundations, hosting, SSL, baseline security, and 30 days of post-launch support. There are no mandatory platform subscriptions or agency retainers. Add the CMS only if you want to edit page content yourself.
See exactly what the price includesYou receive the source code and website files outright. Your domain stays registered in your name, and the site is not tied to WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, or a proprietary page builder. Move hosts or hire another developer whenever you like.
See what is included and excludedBoth rounds cover reasonable copy changes, presentation tweaks, and layout adjustments inside the agreed design. Extra pages, new functionality, major integrations, or a completely different design direction are quoted separately.
See the full build processWe keep our client list short so every website gets our full attention, and there are no build slots open right now.
Leave your email and we'll notify you the moment a slot frees up.
Prefer to talk now? Email hello@500bucksite.com.
We'll email you as soon as a build slot opens up. No spam, no sales sequence - just the one email when there's news.