Is There Actually a Market for Franchise-Level Websites at $399/mo for Independents?

[SavvyNick]

Honest question for the independent dealer community here...
I keep seeing the same pattern: Dealers start with the $99 solutions (Carsforsale, DealerCenter basics, etc.) because they're affordable, but those sites are cookie-cutter, slow, and not built for actual SEO or conversions.
Then they look at the franchise-level providers (Dealer.com, DealerOn, etc.) and see $800-$1500/month price tags and nope out immediately.
So here's my question:
If someone had a website platform at $399/month that actually delivered:
✓ Real SEO (not just "SEO friendly" claims) – individual VDP ranking, proper schema, sub-2.5s LCP
✓ Custom design not templates
✓ Mobile-first performance that doesn't get crushed by Google
✓ Full control over content, not locked into vendor restrictions
✓ Built specifically for independent dealer workflows
Would that price point make sense, or is it still too high?
I'm not trying to sell anything here – genuinely want feedback from dealers who live this every day.
What features would actually move the needle for you at that price? What would you cut to stay at $399? And honestly, would you even consider it, or are you locked into the "pay $99 and deal with it" mindset?
The Gap I'm Seeing:
Most independent dealers I talk to want franchise-level performance but can't justify franchise pricing when they're running 15-50 units. The $99 solutions claim to do everything but don't hit the technical details that actually matter (Core Web Vitals, INP, proper mobile optimization, individual VDP SEO, etc.).
So… is $399 the sweet spot, or am I off base here?
Drop your thoughts – brutal honesty appreciated. What matters most to you: price, features, support, speed, SEO results, or something else entirely?

 

[Chris Cachor]

keep seeing the same pattern: Dealers start with the $99 solutions (Carsforsale, DealerCenter basics, etc.) because they're affordable, but those sites are cookie-cutter, slow, and not built for actual SEO or conversions.

Those dealers get a good bit of value from the $99/mo. Carsforsale.com platform. But I agree they're lacking especially for lead gen. I think that market is more sensitive to price, but if you can deliver a significant improvement in lead volume and traffic I could see some dealers opting for it. Unless there's a big step change I think many of those dealers are happy with the bang for the buck.

 

[SavvyNick]

Those dealers get a good bit of value from the $99/mo. Carsforsale.com platform. But I agree they're lacking especially for lead gen. I think that market is more sensitive to price, but if you can deliver a significant improvement in lead volume and traffic I could see some dealers opting for it. Unless there's a big step change I think many of those dealers are happy with the bang for the buck.

Thanks Chris! I agree its price sensitive and the budget sites lack lead gen. What kind of step up do you think it takes to be worthwhile? When I was in retail I always set the bar at 300% attributable ROI for any marketing spend.

 

[Tallcool1]

Thanks Chris! I agree its price sensitive and the budget sites lack lead gen. What kind of step up do you think it takes to be worthwhile? When I was in retail I always set the bar at 300% attributable ROI for any marketing spend.

I am an Independent Dealer.

The Independent Dealer Body is an extremely diverse group of businesses. It is not what a person would imagine until you really dig into it.

I started going to the National Convention several years ago. This is what I learned:

There are a whole lot more Buy Here Pay Here dealers then I would have ever imagined. A lot of these stored don't even have a website and they don't want or need a website. They have a process, don't want customers that are 100 miles away, and word of mouth is what really drives their business.

There are way more Independent dealers selling Salvage Title vehicles than a person could imagine. They just need a place to list their cars and that place uses 3rd party marketplaces to drive traffic to their site. SEO doesn't mean a whole lot to them because they are killing everyone's prices due to the cars being branded titles.

$99 Carsforsale websites are a hell of a lot better than people realize they are. Look at this website https://www.sarpycountymotors.com/ and run it through a comparison with some higher end sites. This site scores 100 for SEO and damn near 100 for Best Practices. This dealership consistently sells 100+ units a month in a little tiny town off of a gravel lot. Good luck explaining to this guy why he needs to pay another $X,XXX per year.

The bigger Independent dealers that are selling late model, retail, and high volume.....they are already using and justifying $1,500/month websites. This is a really crowded space and a really tough audience to sell to.

Maybe $199/mo. $149 is better.

 

[DjSec]

Some dealerships are paying a lot for their website:

• Dealer Spike: ~$1,149/mo
• Fox Dealer: ~$1,399/mo
• Motive: $2,400/mo
• Room 58: $1,799/mo

And those are old numbers...

So there are thousands of dealerships already paying $1K–$2K+/mo for websites and these websites fail to perform so they spend even more money on:

• Autotrader: $3,000–$5,500+
• CarGurus: $1,500–$3,500+
• Cars.com: $2,000–$4,000+
• TrueCar, etc.

So dealers are clearly willing to spend money… as long as something is actually driving leads.
The price isn't a problem as long as the ROI is there.

And you can't compare a $99/mo site to a performance-optimized platform those sites were built for inventory hosting, not revenue optimization.

The site mentioned (sarpycountymotors.com) may score some Lighthouse categories well, but it also:

• Has invalid markup
• Isn’t ADA compliant (which can get you fined and sued)
• Has extremely slow mobile load times (13.9s load, 9.1s FCP, far outside Google’s accepted thresholds)

And load speed absolutely impacts both SEO and conversions, Google states it clearly, and lots of studies confirm it.

A site that loads in 2s vs 14s can be the difference between:

• 50–70% of mobile visitors bouncing
• Visitors never seeing your VDP content
• Losing leads before they even view the vehicle

Dealers underestimate how much money they lose from slow, template-locked architecture.

What Would an Upgrade Actually Be Worth?

Let’s say a dealer currently nets around $500 profit per vehicle.

If a properly built platform:

Helps them sell just 1 extra car per week

That's $2,000/mo extra profit.

Helps them sell 1 extra car per day
(very realistic if traffic goes from 200/day → 2,000/day)

That’s $15,000+/mo extra profit.

The real question isn’t “Is it too much?”
The real question is:

How much additional profit per month does your website make you?

If not, the platform isn't worth $99 either.

 

[SavvyNick]

I am an Independent Dealer.

The Independent Dealer Body is an extremely diverse group of businesses. It is not what a person would imagine until you really dig into it.

I started going to the National Convention several years ago. This is what I learned:

There are a whole lot more Buy Here Pay Here dealers then I would have ever imagined. A lot of these stored don't even have a website and they don't want or need a website. They have a process, don't want customers that are 100 miles away, and word of mouth is what really drives their business.

There are way more Independent dealers selling Salvage Title vehicles than a person could imagine. They just need a place to list their cars and that place uses 3rd party marketplaces to drive traffic to their site. SEO doesn't mean a whole lot to them because they are killing everyone's prices due to the cars being branded titles.

$99 Carsforsale websites are a hell of a lot better than people realize they are. Look at this website https://www.sarpycountymotors.com/ and run it through a comparison with some higher end sites. This site scores 100 for SEO and damn near 100 for Best Practices. This dealership consistently sells 100+ units a month in a little tiny town off of a gravel lot. Good luck explaining to this guy why he needs to pay another $X,XXX per year.

The bigger Independent dealers that are selling late model, retail, and high volume.....they are already using and justifying $1,500/month websites. This is a really crowded space and a really tough audience to sell to.

Maybe $199/mo. $149 is better.

Thanks for the reply. The website you mentioned passes core vitals but gets a 45 for performance..... for $99 on those metrics it outperforms the big guys. There are several other items to consider with a cars for sale site like domain ownership. I guess I should have been a little more clear. I am trying to see if there is a lane for a $399 site that outperforms the $1500 plus site and where the independent dealer body falls on this. I was an independent back in 05 to 07. It wasn't easy then but it has gotten a lot more difficult to navigate. I appreciate your feedback!

 

[SavvyNick]

Some dealerships are paying a lot for their website:

• Dealer Spike: ~$1,149/mo
• Fox Dealer: ~$1,399/mo
• Motive: $2,400/mo
• Room 58: $1,799/mo

And those are old numbers...

So there are thousands of dealerships already paying $1K–$2K+/mo for websites and these websites fail to perform so they spend even more money on:

• Autotrader: $3,000–$5,500+
• CarGurus: $1,500–$3,500+
• Cars.com: $2,000–$4,000+
• TrueCar, etc.

So dealers are clearly willing to spend money… as long as something is actually driving leads.
The price isn't a problem as long as the ROI is there.

And you can't compare a $99/mo site to a performance-optimized platform those sites were built for inventory hosting, not revenue optimization.

The site mentioned (sarpycountymotors.com) may score some Lighthouse categories well, but it also:

• Has invalid markup
• Isn’t ADA compliant (which can get you fined and sued)
• Has extremely slow mobile load times (13.9s load, 9.1s FCP, far outside Google’s accepted thresholds)

And load speed absolutely impacts both SEO and conversions, Google states it clearly, and lots of studies confirm it.

A site that loads in 2s vs 14s can be the difference between:

• 50–70% of mobile visitors bouncing
• Visitors never seeing your VDP content
• Losing leads before they even view the vehicle

Dealers underestimate how much money they lose from slow, template-locked architecture.

What Would an Upgrade Actually Be Worth?

Let’s say a dealer currently nets around $500 profit per vehicle.

If a properly built platform:

Helps them sell just 1 extra car per week

That's $2,000/mo extra profit.

Helps them sell 1 extra car per day
(very realistic if traffic goes from 200/day → 2,000/day)

That’s $15,000+/mo extra profit.

The real question isn’t “Is it too much?”
The real question is:

How much additional profit per month does your website make you?

If not, the platform isn't worth $99 either.

DJ great stuff. We are trying to bring our Franchise grade Website to market for independents at the $399 price tag.

 

[DjSec]

Thanks for the reply. The website you mentioned passes core vitals but gets a 45 for performance..... for $99 on those metrics it outperforms the big guys. There are several other items to consider with a cars for sale site like domain ownership. I guess I should have been a little more clear. I am trying to see if there is a lane for a $399 site that outperforms the $1500 plus site and where the independent dealer body falls on this. I was an independent back in 05 to 07. It wasn't easy then but it has gotten a lot more difficult to navigate. I appreciate your feedback!

I get what you’re saying, and you're right Carsforsale does outperform many of the big $1,500/mo providers on Lighthouse scores. That’s part of the problem: the industry “leaders” aren’t building high-performance sites either. Almost everything out there, from $99 sites to $1,500+ sites, are nothing more than placeholders, that could get the dealerships sued and fined.

1. Show me a dealership website at any price point that actually hits Google’s recommended performance benchmarks.

I’m not talking about SEO scores in Lighthouse; I mean the real metrics:

• <1 second First Contentful Paint
• <2.5 second Largest Contentful Paint
• Low INP (interaction latency)
• Clean code + accessibility compliance

You’d be hard-pressed to find one outside of ClockTower. None of the major providers are building sites that hit these marks!

And they matter because they affect Google's:

• Crawl budget
• Crawl depth
• Crawl rate
• Crawl timeout

These directly control how many of your pages Google discovers and ranks.

So even if a site “passes Core Web Vitals,” a 9.2s FCP and 13s LCP it still has discoverability and conversion problems.

2. Speed affects revenue ...

Every major study confirms it:

• Amazon: 100ms = 1% more sales
• Mobify: 100ms = 1.11% more conversions
• Walmart: 1s faster = +2% conversions
• Cook: 850ms faster = +7% conversions

Apply that to the site we’re discussing:

If LCP goes from 13 seconds → 1.5 seconds, Cook’s model predicts around a 150% increase in conversions.

That’s not theoretical that’s math based on Cooks data.

Most independent dealers don’t realize how many leads they lose to slow performance:

• Higher bounce rates
• Shorter session durations
• Lower VDP views
• Fewer form fills
• Costlier paid traffic
• Lower organic rankings

A $399/mo platform that fixes these with proof can easily outperform many $1,500–$2,000/mo providers and create a new lane.

If a redesigned site helps a dealer sell even one additional car per week…

At ~$500 front-end profit:

• That’s $2,000/mo in extra profit.

If performance and visibility improvements bring the store from:

• 200 visitors/day → 2,000 visitors/day,
• 1 extra sale → 1 extra sale per day,

…then the math becomes clear.

This is why I keep saying price isn’t the problem ... ROI is the problem.

Dealers will pay $399, $1,500, even $2,400/mo if they believe it will move vehicles.

ClockTower is the test case.

The site just launched, so we need ~90 days of data for:

• Indexing
• Rankings
• VDP visibility
• Lead metrics
• Conversion rates

If it delivers a 150%+ increase in conversion rate is actually conservative.

And if a site starts selling two, three, or ten extra cars per day, the conversation around what it’s “worth” changes entirely.

 

[DjSec]

DJ great stuff. We are trying to bring our Franchise grade Website to market for independents at the $399 price tag.

That’s awesome! If you’ve built a franchise-grade platform at $399, I’d genuinely love to see one of your sites.

And honestly, if your product hits the performance standards we’ve been talking about, you’d be the first provider in the automotive space I’ve seen pull it off. Most dealerships never get the basics right.

For me, the “foundation” of a modern dealer website is pretty straightforward:

Performance that meets Google’s mobile standards

• FCP under 1 second
• LCP under 2.5 seconds
• Stable INP
  Those are Google's minimum requirements for Core Web Vitals.

Clean, validated code

Developers claim to be professional developers but never check their code for errors, W3C validation should be non-negotiable.

Full ADA compliance

This isn’t optional anymore.
If a dealer’s site isn’t compliant, they’re exposing the entire business to lawsuits and fines.

When those three basics are met, then comes the hard part, building a site that generates long-term organic traffic and ranks VDPs. That’s where every major provider struggles.

So I’m really curious:

1. How are you preventing VDPs from becoming index orphans?

Most dealer platforms unintentionally isolate their VDP pages, so Google doesn’t crawl them deeply or consistently.

2. How are you getting individual VDPs to rank for high-intent, high-converting keywords?

I haven’t seen any dealership platform at any price point solve this long term.

I'm excited to see what you’ve built and actually $399 is a bit on the low side, if you can prove your system increases conversions by 150% or more, improves rankings, and does what a website is supposed to do in my humble opinion $399 is a bargain, dealerships are spending thousands per month on 3rd party websites to sell their cars, and it should not be that way.

 

[SavvyNick]

Our approach is the opposite of the typical “try to make every VDP rank” strategy — because that’s a trap.
VDPs aren’t designed to be long-term SEO assets, and trying to force them to rank for competitive keywords creates volatility, cannibalization, and constant re-indexation problems.

I totally agree on the thousands spent on third parties. Coming from a long term Auto retail background tis hard as a dealer to not buy in to that cycle of wanting "more exposure". I wish i would have had a better understanding of this when i was in store.

I appreciate your feedback and would love to get on a call with you and our team to discuss further.