The local-market rate sheet
I did the work to figure out what other people charge around here for similar services. The honest spread, based on quoted rates and public service pages:
| Provider type | Typical hourly rate (Oakland County) |
|---|---|
| Solo freelancer (early career) | $50–$75/hr |
| Cohoon Consulting (me) | $100/hr |
| Established freelancer | $100–$150/hr |
| Local agency (small) | $125–$200/hr |
| Local agency (mid) | $175–$275/hr |
| Larger marketing agency | $250–$400/hr |
My rate sits at the lower end of the established-freelancer band and well below every agency tier. That’s deliberate. Most of my clients are local trades and service businesses where the difference between a $100/hr quote and a $250/hr quote is the difference between “yes” and “maybe next year.”
Why I picked $100/hr and what it includes
I want the math to work for a local business owner who’s comparing my quote to two others. At $100/hr, even a fairly substantial build lands well under what an agency would charge for the same scope — and the deliverable comes with full ownership, training, and no required ongoing retainer.
What’s baked into the rate (no surprise add-ons later):
- Research on your business and your local competitors before I quote.
- The site itself, set up in your own GitHub repo with your own domain.
- Google Business Profile setup and optimization.
- Schema markup, local SEO basics, and analytics wiring.
- A handoff session so you can actually update the site yourself.
- Honest answers to anything you ask along the way.
The hours that used to take a week
Here’s the part that quietly changes the math every quarter: the same project takes me dramatically less time than it did even six months ago.
A static site that used to take 15–20 hours of focused work now takes 6–10. The reasons are unsexy and real: better AI tooling inside Cursor, a growing library of project skills I’ve written that automate the repetitive parts (favicon generation, analytics wiring, blog post scaffolding, client review pulls), and MCP servers that let me push and pull data from Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Google Business Profile without leaving the editor.
None of that is hypothetical. The blog post you’re reading was written using a skill that handles all the boilerplate — the HTML scaffold, the meta tags, the JSON-LD schema, the sitemap entry. What used to be an hour of setup before any writing happened is now a few seconds.
Hourly is a slowly breaking business model
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: every consultant who bills by the hour is in a quietly losing race against their own efficiency. The better I get at my job, and the better the tools get, the fewer hours each project takes — and the less I make per project at the same rate.
For the client, this is great. The same scope of work that cost $2,000 last year costs $900 this year at the same hourly rate. For me, it means I have to either:
- Raise my rate to match the value, or
- Move to flat-fee project pricing that captures the value regardless of how long it takes, or
- Stay on hourly and slowly deliver more per dollar to my clients indefinitely.
I’ve already half-made the move to option 2: most of what I sell is now packaged as a fixed-price project (the 7-Day Liftoff, the 30-Day Owner Bootcamp) rather than open hourly work. But for one-off consulting and add-on work, the rate is still $100/hr, and it’s still quietly dropping in real terms.
What this means for clients in 2026
Three things, depending on where you sit:
- If you’ve been quoted $4k–$8k for a small business website by an agency — get a second opinion. A lot of that quote is the agency’s overhead and a buffer for hours the project doesn’t actually need anymore. A modern small site lands closer to $1,500–$3,500 when built by someone using current tooling.
- If your current web designer is on a monthly retainer that hasn’t changed in 3 years — ask what they’re actually doing each month. The retainer model especially struggles in a world where the work takes a fraction of the time it used to.
- If you’re thinking of hiring fresh — ask whoever’s quoting what tools they use. A designer who’s built into their workflow what used to take 40 hours of manual work has a real efficiency advantage they should be passing on to you in the form of a lower bill or a bigger scope.
One more thing worth knowing
My commitment to clients who hire me right now: when the tooling makes a job faster, the savings go to them, not to my margin. The hourly rate stays the same. The project hours drop. The invoice shrinks. That’s the fair version of this transition.
If you want a real quote for a real project — one based on what the work actually takes today, not what it took five years ago — book a free conversation and I’ll give you honest numbers before we agree on anything.