Why I am writing down other companies’ prices
Because nobody else around here will, and because the mailers landing in Quiet Corner mailboxes never include the number that matters: what you actually pay by month six. Everything below is cited so you can check it yourself. This is not a takedown. Some businesses do fine with these vendors. It is the information you should have before a salesperson has your cell number.
Townsquare Interactive
The pitch is friendly and the entry price is around $250 a month. The documented reality is messier: customer reports collected in the BBB complaint file describe real monthly totals of $450 to $900 once the add-ons stack, and a recurring theme of a $129 a month hosting charge that keeps billing after cancellation. Read a dozen of those complaints and the same pattern repeats: hard to reach, hard to leave, and the site was never quite yours.
Hibu
Hibu sells the bundle: website, search ads, social, display, all managed. Independent reviews put a typical all-in program at roughly $2,300 a month, which is about $28,000 a year. For that money a Quiet Corner shop could buy a site it owns outright and still have more than $25,000 left for the truck. The individual pieces cost less, but piece-by-piece is not how it gets sold on the phone.
Scorpion
Scorpion is the premium tier, aimed at bigger operations: $3,000 to $10,000 or more a month, with 12 to 24 month contracts. The number that should stop you is not the price, it is the ownership: their sites are widely reported to stay with Scorpion when you leave. Pay five figures a year, cancel, and walk away with nothing but your phone number.
The one question that sorts every vendor
Ask it in writing, before you sign: “The day I cancel, who owns my domain, my website files, and my Google Business Profile?”
A good vendor answers in one sentence, because the answer is you. A bad one talks about how nobody ever wants to leave. That single question would have prevented most of the complaints linked above.
For the record, my answer: you own all three from day one. Domain, site, and Google profile are registered in your name, I work inside your accounts as an invited helper, and if you leave, you keep everything and I remove myself. That is written into my one-page agreement, not a verbal promise.
What this means for your budget
The going national-vendor rate in this corner of Connecticut runs from $450 a month on the low end to five figures a month at the top, mostly on contracts, often without ownership. My whole pricing page is public: $3,500 once to build, $149 a month to run, month to month, you own everything. I publish it precisely so you can compare it against the numbers above without sitting through anyone’s pitch, including mine.
If you are already in one of these contracts and want a straight read on what leaving would cost and what you would keep, book a 15 minute call. Bring the contract. I will tell you honestly, including when staying put is the cheaper move.