The answer first
Accounting is the rare vertical where the website vendors publish their prices. In 2026 the template platforms run $85.50 to $166.50 a month (Build Your Firm, CPA Site Solutions), the platform-plus-AI tier runs $150 to $500 (CountingWorks PRO), and general agencies charge $6,500 to $15,000 up front plus $501 to $5,000 a month (WebFX’s published Basic tier). A comparable site from TechTailors at the Professional plan, about 6 billable pages for a typical firm, is $300 a month: $5,850 in year one on monthly billing, or $4,125 with annual prepay, from a published rate card. The lasting difference is the same as every post in this series: at month 13 you own every account and can buy the code; on the platforms you own a subscription.
What the incumbents charge
| Provider | Monthly | Setup | Contract | Notes | Source and date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPA Site Solutions | $90.00 Silver, $111.00 Gold, $137.00 Platinum, $166.50 Diamond | $0 ($99 on Diamond) | None; cancel anytime | “Additional HTTPS Website Security” is a $9.99/mo add-on; unlimited portal storage is $250/mo below Diamond | Primary: their pricing page, captured 2026-08-28 |
| Build Your Firm | From $85.50/mo (Essential); from $108.00/mo (niche or custom) | $0 Essential; one-time fee on niche/custom | None | SSL and SEO included; content library and newsletter | Primary: their website-types page, captured 2026-08-28 |
| CountingWorks PRO | $150 Starter, $200 Grow, $300 Premier, $500 Premier Plus (10% annual discount) | None listed | Monthly or annual | A client-journey platform with AI credits; the website is one component | Primary: their pricing page, captured 2026-08-28 |
| WebFX (general agency, reference) | $501–$5,000/mo ongoing management | $6,500–$15,000 upfront (Basic tier) | Varies | The non-vertical alternative at agency scale | Primary: WebFX published pricing, also cited in our benchmark library |
Credit where due: this vertical mostly does publish its numbers, which is more than the legal-website market manages. Read the fine print anyway. When HTTPS hardening is a $9.99 add-on and unlimited portal storage is $250 a month below the top tier, the sticker is the start of the math, not the end of it.
There is also a sameness problem the price sheets never mention. These platforms sell the same templates and the same pre-written content library to thousands of firms; Build Your Firm and CPA Site Solutions both advertise the library as a feature. Google has no reason to rank the four-hundredth copy of the same tax-tips page, so the cheap sticker often buys an invisible site, and invisibility is the most expensive feature in this table.
What TechTailors charges for the same job
A typical firm site runs about 10 actual pages: home, services sharing one layout, team, about, contact, a resources page. Under page-type pricing that is roughly 6 billable pages at the Professional plan’s $50/page/month.
| Monthly billing | Annual prepay (10-for-12) | |
|---|---|---|
| Build fee (published rate card, Blueprint $250 credited) | $1,500 | $750 (half waived) |
| Security-baseline setup (small band, one-time) | $750 | $375 (half waived) |
| Subscription ($300/mo) | $3,600 | $3,000 |
| Year-one total | $5,850 | $4,125 |
Plus the Cloudflare Business plan the baseline runs on: about $250 a month, roughly $200 on annual billing, billed by Cloudflare to your own account, listed here because hiding a cost you pay is how “as low as” pricing works, and we do not do that.
Why Professional and not the cheaper plan? The FTC’s Safeguards Rule (16 CFR Part 314) treats tax preparers as financial institutions, and IRS Publications 4557 and 5708 expect a Written Information Security Plan behind that. Your website is part of the covered surface. The Professional plan’s security baseline is the website chapter of that WISP as configuration: encryption everywhere, multi-factor sign-in on every admin surface, intake forms that collect name, contact, and topic and never a tax document, a signed agreement from every vendor touching data, breach-notification readiness with the FTC’s timeline in the runbook, and an annual review that produces a one-page attestation letter your WISP file and your insurer can both cite. Not sold as a $9.99 add-on; it is what the plan is. Compute your own numbers in the calculator.
What the premium buys
Call it what it is: TechTailors is a premium anti-agency, priced above the template vendors on purpose. The extra money buys a site that is hand-coded for your firm with no themes, no page builders, and no plugin CMS to patch, designed once, for you, instead of adapted from a library your competitors also rent. Performance carries a written guarantee: any page that scores 95 or below in any Lighthouse category on our monthly test is free that month. The security work is graded A+ by three independent scanners, and you can re-run every scan yourself.
The subscription is fully managed, priced so you never think about the site between tax seasons. Unlimited content edits and maintenance run for the life of the subscription, security patches land without you asking, and technology upgrades are automatic at no extra cost; there is no version of this where your site ages out and a vendor quotes you a rebuild. Every month we run a Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals health audit and email you the scores with a plain-language summary of what we worked on, so the invoice always has a story attached. The SLAs are published with credits we track ourselves, and hosted add-ons carry a 99.9% uptime SLA that credits automatically. The catalog is deeper than a website shop’s, too: blogging on an enterprise-grade CMS, e-commerce, digital advertising, CRO and A/B testing, analytics and ROI reporting, multi-language, site search, and custom integrations all live on the same published rate card, month-to-month after the first year, so the firm that starts with six pages never needs a second vendor to grow.
Search is where the gap pays for itself. Every build includes on-page SEO, a managed Google Business Profile, NAP citations, LocalBusiness schema, sitemaps, and GEO/AEO work for AI-driven search, none of it sold back as a tier. TechTailors is founder-led by someone who came up through SEO, and the local map pack for “CPA near me” is exactly the fight a fast, original, hand-built site wins against the four-hundredth template. When a firm wants to press harder, SEO add-ons bolt on; the foundation never costs extra.
The service is personal because the company is: the person who built your site answers when you need something, on a published response clock (24 business hours on Professional), and clients text us directly. Custom integrations run $250 one-time per service, which regularly retires a recurring middleware subscription in one invoice; intake-to-portal automations are the usual first win for firms. Discounts stack, too: annual prepay is two months free and halves the build and setup fees, a bulk discount takes up to $1,000 off per month as spend grows, and the referral program pays up to $10,000.
We also price the exits, which is a sentence no platform contract contains. The Blueprint is a fixed quote and its deliverable is yours to keep even if you never sign; the build bills by milestone, so you never prepay work; and the 30-day satisfaction guarantee is a written exit from the remaining 11 months if the fit is wrong after Go Live. The exit fee is zero, offboarding is documented before you sign, and the code buy-out is open from day one: have us build the site and buy it outright at Go Live for the at-signing cap, $9,000 on a $300/month site, or stay managed and watch it fall to $5,400 after four anniversaries. Both paths are standard, not exceptions. The annual review states, in writing, when you should be paying us less; ask a template vendor for that sentence. And because every build holds WCAG accessibility standards, an eligible small business may qualify for the federal ADA Section 44 credit of up to $5,000 a year (IRS Form 8826); the calculator estimates it, and you, of all people, know an estimate is not tax advice.
Month 13: what you hold
One clarification before the table: month 13 is the comparison point, not a waiting period. Every account is yours from day one, and the buy-out can be exercised at Go Live as easily as at year four.
| At month 13 | TechTailors | Typical accounting-web platform |
|---|---|---|
| Domain and DNS | Your registrar, your Cloudflare zone | Vendor-managed domain optional at ~$30/yr; transfer varies |
| Hosting account | Yours; we are a removable collaborator | The vendor’s platform |
| Analytics history | Your accounts, exportable free | Vendor dashboards |
| Content | Yours, exportable | Template content is licensed, not yours; your own writing varies |
| The site code | Buy-out any time; the price drops at every anniversary you stay | Template platform; no ownership path |
| Cost to leave | Zero exit fee, documented offboarding | Rebuild; month-to-month vendors at least let you go quickly |
When each option is the right call
Build Your Firm at $85.50 is the honest budget answer for a solo practitioner or EA whose clients come from referrals and who wants a credible, maintained presence with no ownership ambitions. CPA Site Solutions fits firms that want the content library, portal, and newsletter machine in one subscription and accept the add-on math. CountingWorks PRO is a practice-growth platform more than a website; evaluate it as software for your client journey, with the site as one feature. WebFX and general agencies make sense at multi-partner scale where the marketing budget is five figures a month. TechTailors is the right call when the Safeguards Rule is real for you, when your insurer asks questions a template vendor cannot answer in writing, and when you want the site to be an asset that competes: a design no other firm runs, SEO included with the build, owned accounts, a documented baseline with an annual attestation, and a code buy-out whose price falls every year you stay.
Verify us, not our copy
Our one public client site is live and testable: goldmanchiropracticcenter.com, with its PageSpeed results one click away, the same monthly test behind our Lighthouse guarantee. Our own security posture is graded by three independent scanners at /security. Want to test us without a sales call? Run your current site through the website health checker, price your firm in the calculator, or order the free Agency Audit. The full series runs the same math for law firms, advisors, medical practices, and therapists.
Sources
CPA Site Solutions pricing page (primary, captured 2026-08-28) · Build Your Firm accounting-website-types page (primary, captured 2026-08-28) · CountingWorks PRO pricing page (primary, captured 2026-08-28) · WebFX published web-design pricing (primary; also in our benchmark library). Screenshots dated and stored in our repository.
Prices verified 2026-08-28; re-checked quarterly.