What does the $250 a month include?

The build, hosting, SSL, speed and security, and every edit you ask for. No setup fee, no per-page charges, no change-request fees. 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.

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 $250 a month cheap for a dental website?

It's mid-range for the monthly, and 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 and cap your edits. 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 $250?

Paid advertising and the ad spend behind it, professional photography, video production, printed materials, and running your Google Business Profile day to day. I'll advise on all of it and set up the profile properly, but I don't run ad campaigns and I'd be suspicious of a web person who did both.

Why root Costs $250 a Month, Flat — and What's Included

$250 a month covers the build, the hosting, the security, and every edit you ever ask for. No setup fee, no contract, no per-page charges. You can cancel any month and take the site with you.

The honest arithmetic behind that 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 — $250 buys somewhere between an hour and a half and two and a half hours of professional attention a month. That’s about what a single-location practice actually needs, and it’s an awkward amount to sell, which is why most of the industry doesn’t.

What the number covers

The build. Custom, by hand, for your practice. About two 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.
No setup fee. Nothing up front.
No contract. Month to month, cancel whenever.

That last pair is the part that’s genuinely unusual, and it’s worth explaining why rather than just listing it.

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
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 is a small ongoing job — a few changes a month, an eye on speed, occasional restructuring when the practice changes — and $250 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 $250 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.

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.
Day-to-day Google Business Profile management. I’ll set it up properly and tell you what to fix, but the ongoing posting and review responses are yours. Honestly, they should be — they work better when they sound like you.

On that last point, one uncomfortable 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. The website’s job is to not lose them.

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. 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 your practice is one or two locations 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 $250 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.