What does the $149 a month include?

The custom build, hosting, SSL, speed and security, every edit you ask for, and ongoing management of your Google Business Profile. If your hours change or a provider leaves or you drop an insurance plan, you email me and I change it — usually the same day — on the site and on Google.

What is the founding offer?

The first ten practices to sign on get everything root does for $100 a month instead of $149, and that price never goes up for as long as they remain customers. It is the same service, not a reduced tier.

Why is there no setup fee?

Because a setup fee makes leaving expensive, and I'd rather it be cheap. If you pay four thousand dollars up front, you're going to stay with me whether I'm doing good work or not. A flat monthly with no contract means I have to keep earning it. That's the arrangement I want to be in.

Is $149 a month cheap for a dental website?

It's low for the monthly and very low for the total. Published dental vendor prices run from $89 to $800 a month, but the lower ones carry setup fees of $2,000–$4,000, cap your edits, and don't touch your Google Business Profile. What's genuinely unusual isn't the price — it's that there's no contract and no setup fee, so the total cost of trying it is one month.

What happens if I want to leave?

You email me and stop paying. The domain is already in your account under your name. I hand over the files and help move things wherever you're going. There's no notice period, no termination fee, and nothing you owe for the remainder of a term, because there isn't a term.

What is not included in the $149?

Paid advertising and the ad spend behind it, professional photography, video production, and printed materials. Replying to your Google reviews also stays with you — they land better in your voice — though I'll show you how. I'll advise on all of it, but I don't run ad campaigns and I'd be suspicious of a web person who did both.

What root Costs, and What's Included

Q: What does root cost?

$149 a month, flat. No setup fee, no contract, no per-page or per-edit charges. While the founding offer is open, the first ten practices get the same service for $100 a month, locked in for as long as they stay.

$149 a month covers the build, the hosting, the security, every edit you ever ask for, and the upkeep of your Google Business Profile. No setup fee, no contract, no per-page charges. You can cancel any month and take the site with you.

While the founding offer is open, the first ten practices get all of that for $100 a month, and the price stays there for as long as they remain customers. Same service, not a reduced tier.

The honest arithmetic behind the number: hosting and security for a small dental site cost me somewhere between nothing and twenty dollars a month. Everything else is my time. At the rate US web design firms typically bill — $100 to $149 an hour — $149 buys about an hour to an hour and a half of professional attention a month. That’s an awkward amount to sell, which is why most of the industry doesn’t. It’s also about what a single-location practice actually needs, because most months are a handful of edits and a check on the Google listing, and I’ve built the process so those take minutes rather than hours.

What the number covers

The build. Custom, by hand, for your practice. About two to three weeks.
Hosting, SSL, speed, security. Handled. You never see it.
Every edit. Hours, staff changes, insurance list, a new service, a typo you noticed. You email me, I do it.
Your Google Business Profile. Kept accurate and complete — hours, services, categories, photos, and the fixes when Google gets something wrong — with the same email-me arrangement as the site.
No setup fee. Nothing up front.
No contract. Month to month, cancel whenever.

The full spec sheet is on what’s included. The last two lines above are the part that’s genuinely unusual, and they’re worth explaining rather than just listing.

What it costs me

I’d rather show you than assert it.

Line item	Actual cost
Hosting (small static site)	$0–$15/mo
SSL certificate	$0
Domain	$0.99–$60/yr, in your account
Google Business Profile	$0 — it's a free listing
Everything else	My time

There’s no clever margin hiding in the infrastructure, because there’s no margin available in it. Static hosting is close to free now and SSL has been free for years. When a vendor itemizes “hosting and security” at $89 a month, they’re describing labor and calling it a utility.

I’d rather just say it’s labor. The website and the Google listing together are a small ongoing job — a few changes a month, an eye on speed, a look at what Google has quietly altered, occasional restructuring when the practice changes — and $149 is what that job is worth to do properly and unhurriedly. I built the pricing around the work, not around what the market would bear.

Why flat, and why no setup fee

Most dental website companies charge $2,000 to $4,000 up front and then $89 to $300 a month. There’s a logic to it — the build is the expensive part, so you charge for the build.

The problem is what it does to the relationship afterward. Once you’ve paid four thousand dollars, you are going to stay, because leaving means writing off four thousand dollars. The vendor knows this. It’s why edit requests start taking a week around month eighteen.

A setup fee is a switching cost, and switching costs are how mediocre service survives. So I don’t charge one. If I stop being worth $149 a month, you should leave, and the only thing that should make that hard is that you’d rather I didn’t.

The flat part matters for a smaller reason: I don’t want you hesitating before you email me. Vendors who charge per edit — one publishes $99 per additional content page and $50 per page migration — have created a system where you think twice about fixing your own website. Then the hours on the site are wrong for four months. That costs you more than the $99 would have.

Why no contract

Because I couldn’t come up with an argument for one that was about you.

The standard dental agreement runs twelve months and auto-renews for twelve more. One vendor’s published terms require notice no earlier than 90 days and no later than 30 days before the renewal date — miss that window in either direction and you’re in for another year. Another states plainly that if you cancel mid-term you still owe the remaining contracted payments, none of it refundable.

Those terms exist to make revenue predictable for the vendor. That’s a real business problem and I understand it. It’s just not my client’s problem to solve.

Why a founding offer

root is being rebuilt around one kind of customer: the independent solo practice. The first ten practices that sign on during that rebuild get everything root does for $100 a month, and the price is locked for as long as they’re customers.

That’s not a discount to fill a pipeline. It’s payment for something the first practices give me that later ones won’t: the chance to shape the service around real practices before the process is set. If you’re one of the ten, you’re getting a lower price for the rest of the relationship in exchange for being early. When the ten spots are gone, the offer comes off the site.

The thing nobody will put in writing

Here’s something I found while researching the wider market, and it surprised me: I could not find a single dental website company that publishes how long an edit takes.

Several promise “unlimited support.” One caps updates at an hour a month. None of them will tell you whether “unlimited” means Tuesday or three weeks from Tuesday. It’s the single most important number in the relationship after the price, and it is absent from the entire category.

Mine: you email me, I do it, usually the same day. Occasionally the next. If it’s a bigger job I’ll tell you when it’ll be done and then it will be.

That’s not a service-level agreement with penalties attached, and I won’t pretend otherwise — I’m one person, and if I’m on a flight it’ll be tomorrow. But it’s a number, which is more than anyone else offers.

What’s not included

Being straight about the boundaries, because a list of everything included isn’t useful without one:

Paid advertising. I don’t run Google Ads or manage ad spend. I’ll tell you whether I think you need them, and usually I think you don’t yet.
Photography and video. Worth paying a local photographer for. I’ll tell you what to shoot.
Print work. Not my thing.
Replying to your reviews. I keep the Google Business Profile accurate, complete, and current, and I’ll show you how to answer reviews well. But the replies themselves are yours, because they work better when they sound like you.

On that last point, one fact I think you should hear from the person selling you a website: analysis of five million attributed dental patient calls found that 54% came from Google Business Profile alone. More than the website, the ads, and everything else combined. Your free Google listing generates the calls. That’s why the listing is part of the service and not an add-on: the website’s job is to not lose the patients the listing sends, and both have to be right for either to work.

That’s the honest scope of what I’m selling. It’s a real job and it matters, but it isn’t the whole of getting patients, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who told you it was. The fuller picture is in how dental practices get found online.

Who this is wrong for

Multi-location groups and DSOs. You need more than a few hours a month and probably a team. Not me.
Practices that want a marketing department. I build and maintain websites and keep your Google listing right. I’m not running your campaigns, your social, or your patient recall.
Anyone who wants a big agency’s process. There are no account managers, no strategy decks, no quarterly reviews. There’s me and an email address. Some people want the process, and that’s a legitimate thing to want.
Practices needing complex integrations. If you need deep custom work with your practice management software, you may need a developer on retainer rather than a flat monthly.

If you own and run your own practice and your website is a thing you’d like handled rather than a project you want to run, that’s who this is built for. What dental marketing really costs puts the $149 in context against everything else you might spend on.

Happy to walk you through it if you’re curious. Get in touch — no pressure either way.