$1,000 to $5,000 a month: the real proposal we sent a design-build contractor

The client is a family-run design-build contractor serving two counties in the United States, with work spanning custom builds and additions, kitchen and bath remodels, whole-home renovations and outdoor spaces such as sunrooms and decks. Its existing site was a template build whose four service links opened portfolio galleries with two short paragraphs each, and whose only project-review form sat on the contact page with twelve fields.

A design-build sale is a large, slow decision. The buyer looks at finished projects, checks reviews, and wants a clear path from a first conversation to plans and a detailed proposal. The site had the photos but not the structure: no service pages written for the search a homeowner types, no town pages in either county, and reviews rendered inside an embedded frame that search engines could not read.

A mobile Lighthouse run on the home page scored 68 for performance with a largest contentful paint of nine seconds and a page weight near 2.8 MB, against a perfect SEO score, which told us the content was crawlable but the site was slow. The menu's four service links led to galleries rather than service pages. The project-review form existed only on the contact page and asked twelve questions, including street address and plans upload, before anyone had spoken to the client.

Those findings shaped the scope: a faster site, one page per service written for the searches homeowners use, town pages for the two counties, a shorter first-contact form on every page, and reviews moved into the page itself.

The cover was kept deliberately minimal at the owner's request: a hero, two promises, what we saw, seven included rows, the ladder, one demo card, five FAQs and an accept form. The starting fee was $1,000 a month, with the new website included, $0 setup, $0 upfront, a 30-day guarantee and month-to-month terms.

The ladder ran $1,000 to $2,000 to $3,000 to $5,000, each step unlocked by a signed-contract revenue target to be agreed together in writing, with a slow month stepping back down. Ad spend was separate, paid by the client to Google, with the budget to be recommended on the call. The seven included rows covered Google Ads management, the project-review form on every page, follow-up, the new website, SEO including town pages, AI search visibility, and Google Business Profile plus reviews.

The fourth step to $5,000 exists on this proposal and not on most because the owner asked for it: design-build contracts are large enough that a $5,000 fee at a high revenue target is still a small share of the work it would need to produce. The starting point stayed at $1,000 because the client had never run search ads and the fee had to make sense before any result existed.

Excluded: ad spend, which goes to Google; photography, since the client already had a strong project library that the demos used; and any promise of a number of contracts, which the ladder replaces with targets agreed in writing after the fact. A Google rating was left off the demo because no Google Business Profile link could be found for the business, and the proposal said photos of the client's own projects would replace any placeholder the day they were supplied.

The proposal was sent by email on 2026-09-24 at the owner's instruction, with a follow-up scheduled for five days later. At the time of writing it had been sent, and nothing more; this dossier does not describe an outcome because there is none to report.

For a contractor comparing quotes, the useful parts are the shape: a fee that starts small, a website that is part of the fee rather than a separate project, a ladder tied to signed contracts rather than clicks, and ad spend kept out of the agency's hands. SearchPod's public prices are on the pricing page, and a proposal with numbers for your own business takes one business day.