What you can actually plug into a website (and what it costs)

The most common question I get on a first call is some version of “can it do X?” Can it take deposits. Can customers log in. Can I edit it myself. Can it talk to the software we already use.

The answer is almost always yes. The useful question is what it costs and whether you need it, so here is the whole menu with real numbers. Prices below are what you pay the vendor every month. Build cost is separate and depends on scope.

Booking and scheduling

If customers currently book by calling you during business hours, you are losing the ones who thought about it at 9pm.

Cal.com is the one I reach for. Open source, syncs to Google or Outlook, takes deposits through Stripe, sends reminder emails and texts. Free for a single person, $15 a month if you have a team. You can self-host it if you want to own it outright.

Calendly does the same job and more of your customers will recognise it. Slightly less flexible, slightly easier to hand to a front desk person. Free tier works, $12 a month once you want to take payment at booking.

Square Appointments is the right answer if you already run card payments through Square. Booking, deposits, no-show fees, and your POS in one account. Free for one location.

Housecall Pro or Jobber if you are a trade with a crew. These are dispatch systems that happen to have booking attached. The website hands the lead straight into the software your team already opens every morning. From about $49 a month, and worth it the moment you have more than two people in the field.

The one that matters most: deposits. A booking with money attached shows up. A free booking is a maybe. Even $25 changes the no-show rate dramatically.

Payments and e-commerce

Stripe Payment Links are the fastest way to start taking money. One checkout page per product or deposit amount, no store to maintain, no monthly fee. 2.9% plus 30 cents per charge. If you just need to take a deposit or sell three things, stop here.

Stripe Checkout with subscriptions when you need recurring billing. Maintenance plans, memberships, retainer clients. Saved cards, automatic invoices, failed payment retries. Same fees, still no monthly cost.

Shopify, headless if you have real inventory. Shopify runs orders, stock, shipping labels, and tax in the background while the storefront stays fast and fully custom. You get the admin your staff can actually use without inheriting a slow theme. From $39 a month.

Snipcart or Lemon Squeezy for a small catalogue bolted onto a static site, or for digital products where you want somebody else handling sales tax. 2% to 5% on top of card fees.

Honest note: if you are selling more than about 50 products, use a real platform. I will tell you that rather than build you something that becomes my problem forever.

Customer logins and member areas

This is where budgets jump, so be clear about why you want it.

Never roll your own login. Password storage, resets, session handling, and multi-factor are a genuinely hard security problem, and a breach on a small business is unrecoverable. Use a provider.

Clerk or Auth0 handle sign-in with email, Google, or Apple, plus resets and MFA. Free up to roughly ten thousand users, which no small business will hit.

Supabase is a Postgres database, authentication, and file storage in one. This is what I use when a site needs to actually remember things about people: saved quotes, service history, uploaded documents. Free tier, then $25 a month.

Memberstack or Outseta if you want paid membership tiers and gated pages without building an application. Good for course access or a customers-only area. From $29 a month.

The real question to ask yourself: what does a logged-in customer see that they cannot see otherwise? If the answer is vague, you do not need logins yet. A client portal that nobody logs into is the most expensive page on a website.

Forms, CRM, and follow-up

Where a lead goes after they hit send matters more than the form itself.

Formspree or Basin handle form submissions with spam filtering and no backend. Email lands in your inbox and every submission is archived so nothing is lost when you delete the wrong thread. Free up to 50 a month.

HubSpot or Pipedrive put leads into an actual pipeline so you can see who you have not called back. HubSpot has a genuinely usable free tier. This is the single cheapest fix for the most expensive problem in small business, which is leads going cold because nobody remembered.

Twilio SMS alerts text you the second a quote request comes in. About a cent per message. For trades, answering first is frequently the entire competitive advantage. This one integration has paid for itself faster than anything else I have built.

Resend or Postmark for transactional email that actually reaches the inbox. Receipts, confirmations, password resets. Free to about 3,000 emails a month. Do not send these from your website’s own server; they will land in spam.

Editing your own content

You should not have to pay me to change a phone number.

Sanity or Contentful give you a proper editing dashboard for pages, staff, menus, or listings. Structured so you cannot accidentally break the layout by pasting from Word. Free tiers are generous.

Markdown files in Git is the cheapest option that still works properly. Posts are plain text files, every change is versioned, and there is no database to hack. This site runs on it. Costs nothing forever. The tradeoff is you edit text files rather than click around a dashboard.

A Google Sheet as the data source is underrated. Menus, price lists, staff rosters, class schedules. You edit a spreadsheet you already know how to use, and the site rebuilds itself. Costs nothing and no training is required.

Custom tools

The things that do not come out of a box, and usually the reason a project lands in the Premium tier.

Quote calculators. Square footage, job type, add-ons, and the visitor gets a real number instead of a contact form. This filters out people who were never going to afford you before they reach your phone, which is worth more than the extra leads.

Service-area lookup. Visitor types a ZIP code, the site tells them whether you cover it and what the travel fee is. Kills the most common wasted phone call for any business with a radius.

API integrations. Pulling availability, inventory, or pricing out of the software that already runs your business so nothing gets entered twice. If your system has an API, this is usually possible. If it does not, I will tell you that early.

Review automation. Job closes, customer gets a text with your Google review link at the moment they are happiest. Reviews are the highest-leverage local ranking factor there is, and almost nobody asks for them systematically.

What I would actually add, in order

For a typical Omaha home services or trades business, in the order I would spend on it:

1. A tappable phone number and a form that works. Free. Do this first, and check it still works every few months.
2. Google Business Profile set up properly. Free. Bigger impact than most website changes.
3. SMS lead alerts. About a dollar a month. Answering first wins the job.
4. Online booking with a deposit. Free to $15 a month. Converts the 9pm browsers.
5. A CRM. Free tier. Stops leads going cold.
6. Review automation. Compounds forever.

Everything else is genuinely optional until one of those is not enough.

The rule I use

Every integration is a thing that can break, needs updating, and costs somebody money every month. Add one when it removes real work or captures a customer you were losing. Do not add one because it sounds modern.

If you want a straight answer about which of these your business actually needs, that is part of the free audit. Send your URL and you get the list, whether or not you hire me.