The answer first
A small law firm’s website in 2026 costs anywhere from $82.50 a month on Justia Elevate (the published floor, paid annually) to $2,000 to $10,000 a month at legal marketing agencies. Most of the platform vendors in between decline to publish a price at all. A comparable site from TechTailors at the Professional plan, about 9 billable pages for a typical firm, is $675 a month: $11,600 in year one on monthly billing, or $8,500 with annual prepay, every number from a published rate card. The difference that outlasts year one is ownership. At month 13 a TechTailors client holds every account, all their data, and a published price to buy out the code; most incumbent clients hold none of that.
What the incumbents charge
| Provider | Monthly | Contract | Who owns the site | Source and date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Justia Elevate | From $82.50/mo (paid annually) | Annual | Subscription on Justia’s WordPress platform | Primary: Justia’s own price calculator, captured 2026-08-28 |
| LawLytics | About $150/mo on annual billing (third-party figure) | Monthly or annual | Subscription platform | LawLytics publishes no price (its pricing page is a demo video, captured 2026-08-28); figure per Lawyerist’s review |
| FindLaw | $250 to $5,000/mo reported; about $500/mo for basic five-page sites in client accounts (third-party figures) | Three-year lock-ins reported | Departing clients report losing the site, call-tracking numbers, chat, and some content | No published price; OnTheMap’s contract review, Ziegler, Majux, 2026-08-28 |
| Scorpion | $2,000 to $10,000/mo reported; sites $1,000 to $20,000 (third-party figures) | Rigid terms reported; proprietary CMS | Limited control of a proprietary design | No published price; Lawyerist (2.9/5), JurisDigital, OnTheMap, 2026-08-28 |
| Mockingbird | $2,000 to $5,000/mo; bespoke sites $15,000 to $30,000 (third-party figures) | 3 to 6 months, then monthly | Agency-built | No published price; Lawyerist’s review, 2026-08-28 |
Most of these vendors publish no price, and “call for a quote” means the price depends on the call. The ownership column is where the cheap options get expensive: a $500/month FindLaw site that cannot leave with you is a rebuild waiting to be paid for twice.
The published floor has its own fine print. On Justia’s free and lower directory tiers, your own profile can carry ads for competing attorneys; removing them is part of what the paid placements sell, per Lawyerist’s Justia review and Grow Law’s guide. And every platform on this list works both sides of the street: the same vendor, templates, and SEO playbook are for sale to the firm across town, which is a strange foundation for outranking it.
What TechTailors charges for the same job
A typical small-firm site runs about 13 actual pages: home, about, an attorneys page, reviews, an FAQ, a free-consultation page, contact, and five practice-area pages sharing one layout plus their overview page. Under page-type pricing that is 9 billable pages at the Professional plan’s $75/page/month: the practice areas bill as one page, and the overview as one more.
| Line item | Monthly billing | Annual prepay (10-for-12) |
|---|---|---|
| Build fee (published rate card: 8 pages × $250 + 1 page-type × $750, Blueprint credited in full) | $2,750 | $1,375 (half waived) |
| Security-baseline setup (small band, one-time) | $750 | $375 (half waived) |
| Monthly plan ($675 a month) | $8,100 | $6,750 |
| Year-one total | $11,600 | $8,500 |
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. We list it because it is your cost, and because the account being yours is the point.
Professional fits this profession: ABA Model Rule 1.6(c) and Formal Opinions 477R and 483 put written duties on how client information is handled. The plan’s security baseline is those duties as configuration: encryption everywhere, multi-factor sign-in on every admin surface, intake forms that collect only what they must (no “describe your case” box feeding a generic form store), and tracking scripts kept off intake pages. An annual review ends in a one-page attestation letter you can hand your malpractice carrier. Compute your own numbers in the calculator.
What the premium buys
We are a premium web studio, the deliberate opposite of an agency, and in most of this table we cost more than the platforms. Every site is hand-coded, with no theme, page builder, or plugin-stack CMS. The design is built for one firm, yours, rather than adapted from a library that a thousand other firms are running. The performance is guaranteed in writing: if a page drops below 96 in any Google Lighthouse category and we don’t restore it within 48 hours of your report, that page is free that month. The security posture is graded A+ by three independent scanners you can re-run yourself.
It is also fully managed, which is where the hassle math lives. We handle design, development, hosting, security, and maintenance for the life of your monthly plan, with unlimited content edits and automatic technology upgrades at no extra cost. The site never quietly ages into a rebuild the way a three-year FindLaw contract does. Every month we run a Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals health audit, the same methodology as our public website health checker, and email you the scores with a plain-language summary of what we worked on. The SLAs are published. We track our own misses, and most credits land on your next invoice without you filing anything. Every plan carries a 99.9% uptime guarantee with automatic credits (hosted add-ons stack their own SLAs on top).
When the firm grows, the roof grows with it: blogging on a CMS, e-commerce, digital advertising, CRO and A/B testing, analytics and ROI reporting, multi-language, site search, and custom integrations all run on the same published rate card, month-to-month after the first year. Scaling never means hiring a second vendor.
Every build ships with on-page SEO, a managed Google Business Profile, NAP citations, LocalBusiness schema, sitemaps, and GEO/AEO work for AI-driven search. None of it is sold back to you as a tier. TechTailors is founder-led by someone who came up through SEO, and the technical scores above are half the ranking story. A platform selling the same templates and the same playbook to competing firms in the same city cannot take your side.
Service is personal on purpose. The person who builds your site is the person who answers when something breaks, on a published response clock: 24 hours on Professional, nights and weekends included. Clients text us directly. Custom integrations run $250 one-time per service, which can replace recurring middleware subscriptions outright. And the discounts stack. Annual prepay is two months free and halves the build and setup fees, and a bulk discount takes up to $1,000 off per month as your spend grows. The referral program earns you up to $10,000 in invoice credit.
The risk sits with us. The Blueprint is a fixed quote whose deliverable is yours to keep whether or not you proceed. You never prepay the build, because milestones bill as stages complete. And the 30-day guarantee is an exit, not a refund: wrong fit within 30 days of signing, and you walk from the remaining 11 months with no further payment.
Leaving is priced too. The exit fee is zero, and offboarding is documented before you sign. The buy-out is open from day one. Want us to build the site and let you buy out the code at Go Live? The at-signing cap is that price. At $675 a month the code caps at $20,200 at signing and falls to $12,100 after four anniversaries if you stay managed instead. Even our annual review is built to argue against us; it states, in writing, when you should be paying us less.
One more number your accountant will like: if your firm qualifies as an eligible small business, the accessibility work in every build may qualify for the federal ADA Section 44 credit of up to $5,000 a year (IRS Form 8826). The calculator estimates it, and that estimate is not tax advice.
Month 13: what you hold
Month 13 is only the comparison point (the first renewal). The accounts are yours from day one, and the buy-out is available whenever you want it, Go Live included.
| At month 13 | TechTailors | Typical legal-web incumbent |
|---|---|---|
| Domain and DNS | Your registrar, your Cloudflare zone | Often vendor-managed; transfer varies |
| Hosting | Our Cloudflare account, until a buy-out moves the site to yours | The vendor’s platform |
| Analytics history | Your accounts, exportable free | Vendor dashboards, commonly left behind |
| Content you wrote | Yours, exportable | Usually yours in principle; tooling varies |
| The site code | Buy-out any time; the price drops at every anniversary you stay | Proprietary platform; typically no ownership path |
| Cost to leave | Zero exit fee, documented offboarding | Rebuild from scratch; FindLaw departures report worse |
When each option is the right call
Justia Elevate is the honest budget answer. A solo attorney who wants a credible presence at the lowest published price, with no ambition to own the infrastructure, is well served at $82.50 a month, and we will say so on a call. LawLytics fits lawyers who want to write their own content inside a lawyer-specific platform and accept platform residency. Scorpion and Mockingbird are marketing engagements more than websites; if you are buying a $5,000/month lead machine, evaluate them as advertising vendors. FindLaw is the one we struggle to recommend at any price, given the contract-length and exit reporting above. Read the sourced reviews and their comment threads before signing anything for three years. TechTailors is the right call when the site should be an asset and a weapon: owned accounts, a published security baseline with an annual attestation, performance that holds a public guarantee, design built for your firm alone, SEO that ships with the build, and a code buy-out whose price falls every year you stay.
Verify us
Our one public client site is a chiropractic practice, not a law firm, and we would rather show it than hide it: goldmanchiropracticcenter.com is live, and its PageSpeed results are one click away. That is the same test we run monthly under the Lighthouse guarantee: if a page drops below 96 in any category and we don’t restore it within 48 hours of your report, it is free that month. The full rescue story, with the before-and-after walkthrough, shows how that site got this way. Our own site’s security posture is graded by three independent scanners at /security. You can pressure-test us in under five minutes, 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 and we will grade what you have now. The full series runs the same math for CPAs, advisors, medical practices, and therapists.
Sources
Justia Elevate price calculator (primary, captured 2026-08-28) · LawLytics demo/pricing page (captured 2026-08-28, no published price) and Lawyerist’s LawLytics review · OnTheMap’s FindLaw contract review, Justin Ziegler’s cost review, and Majux’s FindLaw analysis · Lawyerist’s Scorpion review, JurisDigital’s Scorpion guide, OnTheMap’s Scorpion review · Lawyerist’s Mockingbird review. Screenshots dated and stored in our repository.
Prices verified 2026-08-28; re-checked quarterly.