We design, rank, and automate small-business websites across the five boroughs. One team, one bill — and we reply same-day.
Most agencies sell you one slice and disappear. We build the whole loop — site, search, follow-up — and stand behind it month after month.
Five-page modern site, mobile-first, hosted, secured, and edited monthly. Built in two to three weeks.
Local SEO, Google Business Profile, citations, and one fresh blog post a month. We measure rank and report monthly.
Missed-call text-back, AI chat, lead routing into a CRM, and review-request automation. The site becomes a salesperson.
A snapshot of recent concept and client work across the boroughs. Real metrics drop in as live engagements close.
No mystery. No four-month timelines. Here's exactly how a Scrappy Works engagement runs.
Free 15-minute call. We screen-share your current site and show you the leaks. No pitch.
Wireframe in 48 hours. Full design in week one. You approve before a single line of code.
Site live in week two or three. We migrate the domain, install schema, set up tracking.
SEO, automation, and monthly edits start day one of month two. Cancel anytime.
We track three things. Not vanity metrics — the things that pay your rent.
50% deposit on signing. Live in two to three weeks. Cancel monthly anytime after the site ships.
Scrappy Works was founded on a simple observation: the average small-business website looks like it was built in 2014 and abandoned in 2017.
We're a small NYC studio that does three things and three things only — websites, local SEO, and lightweight automation. We don't do logo design. We don't run paid ads. We don't sell you a CMS you can't operate.
What we do, we do under one roof, billed once a month, with one inbox that always gets back to you.
— Scrappy Works, NYC
Practical writing on websites, search, and the small-business internet. Updated monthly.
The honest range is wider than anyone tells you. Here's the breakdown — what you'll pay a freelancer, an agency, a Squarespace template, and what each one actually buys you.
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Every item is free, every item moves the needle, and every item takes under 30 minutes. Print it, work top-to-bottom, and watch the calls come in.
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The cheapest piece of automation a service business can install. Setup is under an hour, and most clients see ROI inside the first week.
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The honest range is wider than anyone tells you. Here's the breakdown — what you'll pay a freelancer, an agency, a Squarespace template, and what each one actually buys you.
The first thing every small-business owner does when they decide to redo their website is Google "how much does a website cost." The first thing Google returns is a hundred articles written by agencies that all say "it depends." That isn't an answer. So here is one.
In 2026, the four real options for a small NYC business range from free to about $15,000 for the build, with monthly costs from $15 to $1,000+. Where you land depends on three things: how much of the work you do yourself, how much custom design you actually want, and whether you also need someone to keep it alive after launch. Let's walk through the four real tiers.
Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and Webflow all sell the same dream: drag-and-drop a beautiful website yourself in a weekend. The dream is real, but it costs more than you think — not in dollars, but in your time and your business's appearance.
If you're a comfortable computer user with strong taste, and you have a Saturday and Sunday to spare, you can ship a passable five-page site for the price of a monthly subscription. The catch: their default templates are recognizable, the SEO controls are limited, and the second something needs to change — a new service, a holiday hours update, a Google Business Profile alignment — you're back inside the editor for an hour.
Best for: very early-stage businesses with no marketing budget, or owners who genuinely enjoy fiddling with software.
You find a freelancer on Upwork, Craigslist, or through a friend. They charge somewhere between $1,500 and $5,000, deliver in three to eight weeks, and disappear after launch. Some are excellent. Most are fine. A few will leave you with a half-finished site and a Bitcoin transaction log.
The economics here are simple: a freelancer is a one-shot transaction. You pay once, you get a website, and any future change costs another invoice — usually billed hourly at $80–$150. The good ones quote a clear scope. The bad ones quote a Pinterest board.
What to ask: Will I own the domain and hosting? What CMS does this run on? What happens when I want to change the homepage in six months? If the answers are vague, walk.
This is where Scrappy Works sits. The model: a small team builds your site, then keeps it alive. The deposit covers the build (a five-page custom site, two to three weeks). The monthly retainer covers hosting, ongoing edits, and — depending on the tier — local SEO, content, and lead-capture automation.
The whole point of this tier is that the small business isn't paying for "a website" — they're paying for a functioning marketing channel. A site nobody visits is worth nothing. A site that ranks on Google, captures leads, and texts back when someone calls and you're on the truck is worth the entire monthly check by week two.
Best for: owners who would rather pay one bill a month than juggle a freelancer, a hosting plan, an SEO consultant, and three SaaS tools.
Bigger agencies — Accenture-trained boutiques, full-service marketing firms, brand-led design studios — start their builds at $8,000 and routinely cross $15,000. Custom illustration, photography, video, complex e-commerce, and dedicated project management are why. For most local NYC small businesses, this tier is overbuy. For a 30-location restaurant group with a B2B catering arm, it isn't.
Best for: businesses with $1M+ in annual revenue, a defined brand strategy, and the operational maturity to run a six-month engagement.
Whatever tier you pick, three line items will show up that nobody tells you about:
If we had to give one honest number for a typical service business in NYC — a contractor, a restaurant, a wellness clinic — it's somewhere around $2,500 build + $499 a month. That gets you a custom site, hosting, monthly edits, local SEO, and a Google Business Profile that actually works. It is not the cheapest option, and it is nowhere near the most expensive. It is the option that pays for itself fastest.
Anything cheaper, and you're either doing the work yourself or buying a one-time deliverable that depreciates the day it ships. Anything more expensive, and you're paying for capabilities your business can't yet capitalize on.
We'll screen-share your current site live, point out what's costing you customers, and give you a fixed quote on the spot. If it doesn't make sense, we'll tell you that too.
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Every item is free, every item moves the needle, and every item takes under 30 minutes. Print it, work top-to-bottom, and watch the calls come in.
Local SEO is the cheapest, highest-leverage marketing a small business can do. A pizza place that ranks first in the Google "map pack" for "pizza near me" in its zip code will out-earn one that ranks fifth by a factor of four to one — and the work to climb three spots is mostly free, mostly clerical, and mostly skipped because nobody wants to do it.
Here is the work. Twelve items. Top to bottom. If you have a Saturday morning and a cup of coffee, you can do half of it before lunch.
If you do exactly one thing on this list, do this. Go to google.com/business, claim your listing, and fill in every field — name, address, phone, hours, service area, services, photos, attributes. A complete GBP outranks an incomplete one in 100% of cases. Do not skip the photos. Add at least 20.
NAP consistency is the boring foundation of local SEO. If your Google profile says "1234 Atlantic Ave" but your Yelp says "1234 Atlantic Avenue, Suite 2," Google quietly trusts you less. Audit Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, Facebook, and any industry directory you appear in. Make every NAP identical to your GBP.
Most small business sites bury their service area in the footer. Bring it forward. A simple paragraph — "We serve all five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island" — gives Google the geographic signals it needs and tells the visitor they're in the right place.
If you do plumbing, you should have a homepage, an "About" page, a "Plumbing" page, a "Drain Cleaning" page, a "Water Heater" page, and so on. Google ranks specific pages for specific queries. A single "Services" page that lists everything in bullet points ranks for nothing in particular.
Reviews are the second most important local-SEO signal after a complete GBP. The trick is asking. After every job — every haircut, every appointment, every install — text the customer your Google review link. The conversion rate on a same-day text is roughly 30%. Asking ten people gets you three reviews. Do this for a month and you'll have 30 new reviews — usually enough to overtake a competitor with 12.
Google watches whether you reply. Replying signals an active business. Replying to a negative review with grace signals a mature one. Two-sentence replies are fine: "Thanks, Maria — we're glad the install went well. See you for the seasonal tune-up."
The Google Posts feature is wildly underused. Post a special, an update, a project photo, a holiday hours note. Once a week, eight minutes, free. It tells Google your business is active and gives potential customers fresh signals on your map listing.
A "citation" is just a business listing on a third-party site. The big five for any NYC small business: Yelp, BBB, Foursquare/City Search, the Better Business Bureau, and your industry-specific directory (Houzz for contractors, Healthgrades for medical, Avvo for legal, OpenTable for restaurants). Make them all match your GBP exactly.
Schema markup is invisible code that tells search engines exactly what your business is, where it's located, and what it sells. The "LocalBusiness" type covers most small businesses. A working web developer can install it in 20 minutes; a template site builder usually has a plugin for it. Sites with schema get rich-result treatment in Google's results — which means they look more impressive in the SERP and get clicked more.
Run your homepage through pagespeed.web.dev. If your mobile score is under 70, you're invisibly losing rank. The two biggest causes are unoptimized images (compress them) and too many third-party scripts (remove the ones you don't use). A site that loads in under 2.5 seconds will outrank a slower competitor with similar content.
A single link from a credible local source — a chamber of commerce page, a neighborhood blog, a sponsored event page — is worth more than 50 directory listings. Pick one a month: sponsor a youth team, get listed in a "best of" roundup, partner with a complementary business and exchange one mention each.
What gets measured gets managed. Once a month, search your three primary keywords ("plumber near me," "[zip] HVAC repair," etc.) from a phone you've signed out of Google on, and screenshot where you rank in the map pack. A four-line spreadsheet — month, keyword, rank, notes — tells you whether the work is working.
"You don't need to be the best plumber in your zip code. You need to be the most findable one."
That's the whole list. Twelve items. None of them are clever. None of them are paid. All of them are skipped by nine out of ten small businesses in your area, which is exactly why they will work for you.
Our Growth tier handles items 1–12, every month, automatically. We report ranks, track reviews, and post weekly. $499 a month, cancel anytime.
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The cheapest piece of automation a service business can install. Setup is under an hour, and most clients see ROI inside the first week.
Here's a number that will frustrate any small-business owner: 62% of inbound calls to local service businesses go unanswered. The owner is on a job. The receptionist is at lunch. The phone rings four times and the caller hangs up. That caller does not leave a voicemail. They call the next business on the list.
If your business does $500K a year on inbound phone calls, you're losing somewhere between $30K and $80K a year to unanswered phones. That's a math problem, not a marketing problem — and the fix is one piece of automation that takes about 45 minutes to set up.
The setup is exactly what it sounds like. When someone calls your business and the call goes unanswered for more than a set number of rings, the system automatically sends them an SMS:
"Hi — sorry we missed you. This is Scrappy Works. Can we help with something? Reply here and we'll get right back to you."
That's it. The caller, who was already in buying mode the moment they dialed, gets a friendly, immediate response on a channel they actually check (text). Reply rates run between 30% and 50%. Of those replies, about half convert to a booking, a quote, or a sale.
The math: If you take 100 calls a week and miss 62, a missed-call text-back sends 62 texts. About 19 reply. About 9 convert. That's 9 jobs a week you weren't getting.
Three reasons:
Most small businesses can run missed-call text-back through one of three tools: a CRM with a phone module (HighLevel, Keap, HubSpot Starter), a dedicated phone-routing tool (OpenPhone, Dialpad, RingCentral), or a Twilio-based custom flow if you want it bare-bones.
Cost ranges from $25 to $99 a month depending on the tool. Setup is under an hour for someone who's done it before, and a half-day for someone who hasn't.
The fix is simple, but three details determine whether it works or annoys people:
Missed-call text-back is the gateway automation. Once it's installed, the obvious next pieces line up: an AI chat widget on the website that captures and qualifies leads when nobody's at the desk; an automated review-request text after every completed job; a CRM that holds every lead in one place instead of three Post-it notes and a Gmail thread.
None of these tools are expensive in 2026. None of them require an engineer. The only barrier is that nobody is going to set them up for a small business unless someone makes it their job. That's the work we do.
It's the first piece of automation in our Pro Automate tier — alongside an AI chat widget, CRM setup, and review automation. Most of our clients see ROI inside week one. $999/month, cancel anytime.
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Tell us your business name. We'll screen-share your current site live, point out the leaks, and quote you on the spot if it makes sense. If it doesn't, we'll tell you that too.