Anywhere from $15 a month to $15,000, and the price tells you almost nothing about whether AI will ever name your agency. The useful way to think about it is four tiers, what each one actually gets you, and the one cost none of them put on the pricing page.
Last updated: October 9, 2026
What are the four price tiers?
We see every kind of agency site come through the audit, and the platform detection tells us what each one runs on. The ranges below are our estimates from the platform each site uses, not vendor quotes, so treat them as the neighborhood rather than the address.
| Tier | Roughly what it costs | What you get | Who maintains it |
|---|---|---|---|
| General builder (Wix, GoDaddy, Squarespace, Duda) | $15 to $90 a month | A template, a drag-and-drop editor, hosting | You |
| Insurance-specialist platform (Forge3, BrightFire, Advisor Evolved, EZLynx, Zywave) | $100 to $450 a month, sometimes a setup fee | Insurance templates, carrier logos, quote forms, a support ticket queue | You, with tickets |
| Custom build (a web shop or freelancer) | $5,000 to $15,000, plus $50 to $500 a month hosting and upkeep | Whatever you scoped, once | Whoever you can get on the phone |
| Managed agency site (ours) | $150 a month, or $250 with monthly content, no build fee | The complete site, built before you pay, kept current | Us |
InsuranceSplash publishes $89 a month for a built, hosted and maintained site, which is the closest public comparison to ours. BrightFire and Forge3 charge monthly with no contracts and no setup fee but do not publish the number. Advisor Evolved charges a setup fee in the four figures plus a monthly rate. Ask each of them directly; prices move.
Does a more expensive website rank better in AI search?
No. That is the finding that surprised us most.
Across the 151 agency sites we have audited, the median AI search score is 42 out of 100. The sites that scored worst were not the $20-a-month Wix sites. They were the custom or unidentifiable builds, which made up 34 percent of the sites with platform data, and every single site our crawler could not read was one of them. Somebody paid real money for a site that renders entirely in JavaScript, and the machines see a blank page.
The insurance-specialist platforms did fine on readability. None of them shipped a site the crawler could not read. Their weakness was different: the same template for every agency, so the machine sees the same generic text on two hundred sites and has no reason to name yours over the next one.
Price buys design. It does not buy the three things AI actually checks: whether it can identify you, whether other sources vouch for you, and whether it can read your pages. Those are mostly free, and the checklist is public.
What is the cost nobody puts on the pricing page?
Your time, and it is the one that decides everything.
A builder site is $30 a month and about four hours a month of somebody’s attention if it is going to stay current. A specialist platform is $200 a month and a ticket queue. A custom build is a one-time check and then a slow decay, because the developer moved on and nobody in the agency knows how to add a page. In every case, the real question is who logs in on a Tuesday afternoon to fix the hours, add the new producer, or write the piece about the hail season. Almost always, the answer is nobody, and the site goes stale in a year.
That is the actual reason we built ours the way we did. There is no login. The agency does not build anything, edit anything, or maintain anything, because in fourteen years of watching agencies we have never seen that job get done. The $150 buys the part that never happens otherwise, and the $250 plan adds the content nobody in the agency was ever going to write.
Price is only half of it. The other half is what the site brings in for that money. We counted real leads on four live agency sites and published the numbers, with the rules, in how many leads an insurance agency website should get.
What is the one question to ask before paying anyone?
Can a crawler read this site without running JavaScript?
Ask it exactly like that. A vendor who knows what they are doing will answer in one sentence. A vendor who does not will talk about design. If they cannot answer, do not pay, at any tier, because a site the machines cannot read cannot be recommended by them no matter how it looks.
Then run the free audit on your current site before you decide anything. It reads the site the way a crawler does, runs seven buyer prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI for your market, and tells you whether the problem is the site at all. If your fundamentals are in place, keep what you have and work the checklist. If the crawler sees a blank page, a new site is cheaper than a repaired one, and we will build it before you pay so you can judge it finished.