What Does An Agency Charge To Rebuild A 1,700-Page Website? I Priced It Out.

I rebuilt a website for a client a few weeks ago. Texas Wildlife Specialists, a wildlife removal company in Texas. The new site has over 1,700 pages.

Out of curiosity, I priced out what a marketing agency would have charged for the same job.

If you want to see the rebuild itself, the numbers and the screenshots are on the case study. This post is about the question I kept getting after we shipped it: what would a real agency have charged?

Why I'm even asking this

Texas Wildlife Specialists was Front Door Digital's first client. We did the rebuild at $0 in exchange for case-study rights, so I never got a real agency quote on the project.

But the question kept rattling around. What would a real shop have charged a small business owner for a 1,732-page programmatic SEO site?

I sat down and ran the math. Here is what I found.

What "programmatic SEO" actually means

"Programmatic SEO" is industry jargon for a site where most of the pages are generated from a data set instead of typed by hand. For Texas Wildlife Specialists, that meant generating a page for every Texas city and every service combination. Around 17 services. Roughly 100 cities. Plus species reference pages, neighborhood pages, FAQ pages, and the rest of the site. The math gets to 1,732 published pages quickly.

Most agencies do not do this. They build sites where every page is a hand-typed deliverable. That model breaks down fast at this scale, so the price has to scale with it.

The agency price tiers, walked through

WordPress shops: $3,000 to $8,000

The local "we build your site for $5k" shops will not take a 1,700-page programmatic build. They are not set up for it. They will quote you a 10-page brochure site, hand you a WordPress login, and call it done. The price is fine. It is just for a different product.

General-purpose local agencies: $10,000 to $18,000 plus monthly retainer

Most local agencies will also not take this kind of job. The work does not fit their team, which is usually a designer, a writer, and a part-time developer. Even if they took it, you would be looking at $10,000 to $18,000 for the build plus a monthly retainer, and the result would not actually be programmatic. It would be 50 hand-typed pages plus a sitemap with a lot of placeholder URLs.

Specialized programmatic SEO agencies: $40,000 to $150,000 plus retainer

This is where the work actually lives. There are a small number of agencies that specifically do programmatic SEO for businesses with a long-tail intent surface, like a wildlife removal company that wants a page for every Texas city. Their builds typically start at $40,000 setup with a $10,000 per month retainer floor for ongoing content and ranking work. The high end is $150,000 setup, plus retainer, for builds with custom data pipelines and large internal-linking systems.

Big SEO agencies: $150,000 to $300,000

At the top end you have the established SEO agencies that have been doing this for over a decade. Their proposals come in with a content team, a dev team, a project manager, and a 12-month retainer baked in. You will see numbers between $150,000 and $300,000 for the upfront build. The work is real. But the price is not aimed at small home-services owners.

And if every page were hand-written: $692,800

Just for a sanity check: if you priced out 1,732 pages of decent SEO copy at $400 per page, you would land at $692,800 in copy alone. Before any design, development, or hosting.

That is the dumb way to do it. Nobody actually builds it that way for a small business. But the per-page copywriting math is useful because it shows why specialized agencies put a retainer floor on this kind of work in the first place. They cannot make the unit economics work without one.

What Front Door Digital actually charged

Texas Wildlife Specialists got the rebuild for $0. We agreed up front: I would build the site at no cost in exchange for the right to use it as a case study. They got 1,732 pages. We got our first portfolio piece. That was the deal.

Going forward, a build of this size is custom-quoted. It is outside our published $1,500 to $4,997 setup tiers, which are sized for normal local home-services sites of 30 to 80 pages. But it is also nowhere close to the $80,000 to $200,000 floor most specialized agencies start at, and there is no $10,000 per month retainer attached.

I am not going to commit to a specific number in a blog post for a custom build. The honest answer is that for a programmatic site of this scale, my number lands at a fraction of what a specialized agency would charge, with no retainer lock-in.

Why does the gap exist

Two reasons.

The first is that traditional agencies bill by labor hours. A 1,700-page hand-built site is genuinely thousands of hours of work, and the price reflects that. The actual production cost on the agency side is mostly people's time.

The second is that a programmatic site is not a 1,700-page hand-built site. It is a smaller set of carefully-designed templates, a clean data set, and a build pipeline. The 1,732 pages get generated. The labor is in setting up the system once, not in producing each page. So the cost on my side is mostly the upfront design and engineering, and that scales very differently than agency hours do.

Most agencies have not made the switch. Some cannot. Some do not want to. The pricing reflects the way they are built, not the way the work actually has to happen in 2026.

What this means if you are getting quotes

If you are a local home-services owner and you are looking at quotes north of $50,000 for a website rebuild, get a second opinion.

That is not me saying every $50,000 quote is wrong. Some builds genuinely cost that much. Real custom branding, real custom design systems, real content production at scale. But for the kind of site most local home-services businesses actually need, including the long-tail SEO footprint that drives city-by-city visibility, the work usually costs a small fraction of what big agencies charge for it.

You should know what the work actually costs before you sign anything.

If you want a sanity check on a quote you have received, or you want to see how your current site stacks up before you go quote-shopping, grab a Front Door Score. Free, no pitch, no contract. Takes about 90 seconds.

Tom Porter, Owner, Front Door Digital