If you go shopping for a website audit, you will find three prices that don’t seem to add up: $0, around $350, and $3,000 or more. The work being described in all three cases uses the same word (“audit”), which makes the gap feel arbitrary or unfair. It isn’t. Each price reflects a real difference in what gets produced and who it gets produced for. The hard part is figuring out which one matches what you actually need.
Here is the full picture.
The $0 tier: automated scanners
Free site scanners are everywhere. Google’s own PageSpeed Insights is one. So are GTmetrix, Sucuri SiteCheck, the various WordPress and Shopify plugin scans, and a dozen “free SEO audit” tools that exist as lead magnets for agencies trying to sell you something else.
The price is real. They are free. The cost is paid elsewhere: in the limits of what an automated script can actually measure, and in the steady drip of marketing emails the lead-magnet versions will send you afterward.
What you get:
- A score, usually expressed as a number out of 100 or a letter grade
- A checklist of the technical signals the scanner is built to detect
- Generic recommendations like “compress images” or “reduce server response time”
What you don’t get:
- Judgment about which findings actually matter for your business
- Confirmation that the human-facing parts of the site (contact form, CTAs, trust signals) actually work
- A written remedy plan you can hand to a developer or implement yourself
- A document that will still be useful in six months
The right use for a $0 audit: a gut check. Run it on your site, look at the obvious red flags, fix the easy ones. It is genuinely useful as a first pass. It is not useful as the only audit your business ever gets.
The $350 tier: human-reviewed audits
This is where the Pro Diagnosis + Remedy Package sits, and where most small business owners belong.
A person opens a real browser, walks your live site, runs fifty checks (twenty-eight standard plus up to twenty-two additional diagnostics that apply to your specific site), categorizes every finding as Critical, High Value, Pass, or Nice-to-Have, and writes a step-by-step remedy for every Critical and every High Value finding. The deliverable is a single PDF: cover, executive summary, Priority Action List, full Remedy Package with copy-ready code, and a complete record of every finding for future reference.
Turnaround is 24 hours from purchase. The audit is yours, in PDF form, on your computer, useful whether or not you ever hire us again.
The right use for a $350 audit: any small business whose website is the front door. You want to know what to fix, in what order, with instructions that don’t require a developer translator. You want a document you can shelf and reference. You want the work to be honest about what is fine and what is broken.
This is the middle tier the market was missing. It is too expensive to be free and too cheap to feel like a luxury, which is exactly the point.
The $3,000-plus tier: full agency audits
Top of the market. Usually part of a larger discovery engagement. The work is similar in kind to the middle tier (a person reading the site, running checks, writing recommendations) but layered with extras: competitive analysis, customer journey mapping, content strategy, a presentation deck, a two-hour stakeholder readout, sometimes a follow-on retainer.
The team is larger. Three to six people might touch your audit. The PDF is longer, sometimes by a lot.
What you actually get for the money:
- Depth across business strategy, not just website mechanics
- Multiple expert perspectives (a designer, a developer, a content strategist, a paid-media specialist)
- An on-site review meeting where the work gets walked through
What you don’t necessarily get:
- A meaningfully different list of website findings than the middle tier produces
The right use for a $3,000-plus audit: a company with twenty-plus employees, a marketing budget in the thousands per month, a website that drives most of the revenue, and a team that can absorb a strategic recommendation set. Overkill for most local businesses.
How to know which tier is right for you
Three honest questions:
- Is your website the front door of your business? Most leads, most discovery, most first impressions happen there? If yes, you have moved past the free-scan tier. The cost of being wrong is too high.
- Do you spend more than $200 a month on paid traffic pointing to the site? If yes, the audit pays for itself the first time it surfaces a conversion-path issue you didn’t know about.
- Do you have an in-house team that can absorb strategic recommendations and act on them? If yes, the agency tier might be worth it. If no, the strategy deck will sit in a folder.
Most small business owners we work with answer “yes,” “yes,” and “no.” That puts them in the middle tier, which is exactly where the Pro Diagnosis + Remedy Package is built to be.
A note on what the price actually pays for
The middle tier price ($350) is not a discount on the agency tier. It is its own product, built around its own promise: a thorough, honest, written, written-for-non-developers audit of a small business website, delivered within 24 hours, useful on its own.
The middle tier doesn’t undercut the agency tier and doesn’t overpromise the free tier. It does what is actually needed for the bracket of business it serves. That is what the price reflects, and that is why the gap between $0 and $350 and $3,000 makes sense once you look at what each tier is actually producing.
If your website matters to your business and you have been pinging between the free-scanner tier and the agency tier and neither one fit, the middle tier is probably where you belong. The Pro Diagnosis + Remedy Package is what we built for it.