For therapists

Own or Rent? What a Therapist Website Really Costs, Especially the Day You Cancel

If you run a solo practice, you probably pay somewhere between $100 and $200 a month for software: an EHR, telehealth, a directory listing, maybe a scheduler, and a website. Most of those subscriptions earn their keep. One of them usually doesn't, and it's the only one you could actually own instead.

This article adds up what therapists really pay to rent a website, explains what happens the day you cancel (it's worse than most people expect), and lays out the alternative. It's written to be useful even if you never hire anyone: by the end you'll have five questions that will protect you with any web company, including ours.

What renting actually costs

These are the published prices as of July 2026, taken from the companies' own pricing pages.

Brighter Vision, the best-known website company built specifically for therapists, charges $99, $179, or $349 per month, plus a $100 setup fee on the two lower tiers. (Annual billing brings the monthly figure down to $78–$299.) HIPAA-secure email and forms are a paid add-on starting around $15/month, through a Hushmail partnership.

TherapySites runs six tiers from $69 to $336 per month, plus a $199 one-time setup fee. To their credit, there are no long-term contracts.

Generic builders like Squarespace or Wix run roughly $16–$39 per month if you do the work yourself, with the important caveat that neither signs a HIPAA business associate agreement, so no client health information should ever pass through their forms.

For scale: SimplePractice, a full EHR with scheduling, notes, a client portal, and telehealth included, is $49–$99 per month. A rented marketing website at $179/month costs more than the software that runs your entire clinical practice.

Now the math over time, because subscriptions hide their real price in the calendar:

Owning costs more up front. By year three the lines cross, and from year four on, the owned site costs a few hundred dollars a year while the rented one keeps costing thousands. But the money is honestly the smaller issue.

What "cancel" actually means

Here is the part that surprises people.

Brighter Vision's service agreement provides that when your subscription is cancelled or terminated, the company owns the rights to the content, logo, and design work it created for you under the service. Their FAQ confirms you keep your domain name, and that's the list. The site, the design, the pages, the copy you spent hours reviewing and revising: those were never yours. You can sometimes buy backups of site files for an additional fee, but the site itself comes down.

This isn't a scam; it's the rental model working exactly as written. You paid for access, not ownership. But most therapists signing up believe they're paying someone to build their website, and the contract says otherwise.

There's a second, quieter cost: search standing. If your site has lived at your domain for five years, Google has learned to trust it. Cancel, and the pages behind those rankings disappear. You can redirect the domain to a new site and recover some of it, but some is simply gone: years of "therapist in [your town]" visibility, reset.

TherapySites is friendlier on contracts (month-to-month, cancel anytime), but the same structural fact applies: the website is theirs, and their domains are registered through their provider, register.com. If you're a TherapySites customer, the single most useful thing you can do this week is confirm your domain is registered in your name, in an account you control. That's true for every provider, actually.

And the rented model has one more problem: prices move, and not in your favor. SimplePractice raised its Starter plan from $29 to $49 in 2025, a 69% increase. When a platform holds your website, your content, and your search standing, "take it or leave it" pricing isn't a negotiation. Leaving costs you the asset.

The alternative: own it

Owning a website is not exotic. It means four specific things:

1. The domain is registered to you, in your own registrar account.
2. The site's files and content live in accounts you control: hosting, code, images, copy. If your web person disappears tomorrow, the site stays up.
3. The words and design are yours by contract. Whoever builds it assigns the work to you, in writing.
4. There is no monthly fee required to keep the lights on. Hosting for a small practice site costs somewhere between free and a few dollars a month. Anything above that should buy actual ongoing work, not permission to exist.

The honest structure for this is a flat, one-time build (for a custom therapist site with online booking and intake, typically somewhere between $1,500 and $5,000 depending on scope) plus an optional monthly care plan if you want a human keeping it updated, monitored, and backed up. Optional is the key word. A care plan you can cancel without losing your site is a service. A monthly fee you can't cancel without losing your site is rent.

One honest trade-off: owning means someone has to care for the thing. Software updates, renewals, the contact form silently breaking. If you genuinely want zero involvement and don't want to pay anyone for upkeep, a rented site is a defensible choice; you're paying a premium for someone else to hold the responsibility. Just make that choice knowing the exit terms.

Keep your EHR. Question the layer on top of it.

To be clear about what this argument is not: it's not "cancel everything." SimplePractice, Jane, TherapyNotes: these are reasonable clinical systems of record. Your notes, scheduling, and billing genuinely benefit from a maintained platform with a signed business associate agreement, and $49–$99/month for that is fair.

The website is different. It's a public brochure with a booking button. It doesn't need to live inside anyone's platform, it changes rarely, and it's the piece where the rental premium is highest and the lock-in hurts most. Own the website layer; rent the clinical layer. Let them hand off to each other.

Two compliance notes worth knowing regardless of who builds your site:

• Forms: if a website form collects client health information, the vendor processing that form must sign a business associate agreement (BAA). Most website builders won't. Either keep website forms free of health information (name, email, "I'd like a consultation", nothing clinical) or use a form vendor that signs a BAA.
• A free resource: Doxy.me offers telehealth with a signed BAA on its free tier, one of the few genuinely free, genuinely compliant tools in this space. Worth knowing even if you never change anything else.

Five questions to ask anyone who builds your website

Including us. If the answers are vague, that's your answer.

1. If I stop paying you tomorrow, what do I still have? The only acceptable answer is "everything, and the site keeps running."
2. Is the domain registered in my name, in my account? Not "we handle that for you."
3. Who owns the design and the words when we're done? You should, in the contract, not in conversation.
4. Can I get the complete site files at any time, without a fee?
5. Is there a contract term, a cancellation fee, or anything I lose by leaving?

Ask these before you sign anything, and you'll avoid every problem described in this article, no matter who you hire.

Where we fit (briefly)

Headlands builds consoles for small practices: one interface to monitor, control, and automate your operation, built for you and owned by you. For a therapy practice, that means your website, booking, and intake in one place, handing off to the EHR you already trust. Your domain, your data, yours to keep. Flat build quoted before we start; a care plan at $39/month for founding practices; leave anytime with everything.

Everything you run. One screen. If the five questions above interest you more than the pitch, good. That was the point.

Prices verified against providers' published pricing pages, July 2026. Pricing changes; check the source before deciding.