RunCabin Blog · Budgeting basics

How much should you budget for marketing in your first year?

September 10, 2026 · 8 min read

Short answer: less than you think on paid leads, and more than zero on the one thing that is actually predictable - a website. Most new owners do the opposite. They spend nothing until the job calendar goes quiet, then panic-buy leads at whatever price a platform names that week. There is a saner order: get the free stuff working first, put one small fixed cost behind the asset you actually own, and only then test paid channels - with a number you set, not one they set.

Here is a realistic way to think about the first twelve months, without inventing numbers that do not hold up.

Start with what is actually free

Before any money moves, three things cost nothing and matter more than most paid options in year one:

• A Google Business Profile - free, and it is where most local searches actually resolve. Claim it, verify it, fill in every field.
• Reviews from the customers you already have - even five or six real reviews on a brand-new profile change how a stranger reads you. Ask in person, at the moment the job wraps and the customer is happiest, not by a form email a week later.
• Word of mouth and your existing network - the first customers for almost every new local-service business come from people who already know the owner, not from an ad.

None of this needs a budget line. It needs follow-through, which is a harder currency to spend than money but a cheaper one.

The one paid line item worth having on day one: a website

This is the part new owners skip longest, usually because "I'll build it once things are busier" - and then things get busier and there is still no website. The honest case for doing it early is not vanity, it is math: a website is the cheapest, most predictable cost in the whole budget. DIY builders run roughly $16-30/mo, done-for-you options land higher, but either way you are looking at a flat number you can plan around for the entire year, not a per-lead or per-click price that moves with demand. (The full breakdown of what different providers charge, and what hides in the fine print, is in how much a small-business website really costs.)

The reason this line item comes before paid leads or ads, not after, is simple: every dollar you spend sending someone to look you up needs somewhere for them to land. A referral who Googles your name and finds nothing, or finds only a Facebook page, is a referral you already half-lost. Fix that first, cheaply, and every other dollar you spend afterward works harder.

Paid leads: budget a test, not a habit

Platforms like Angi and Thumbtack sell access to people actively looking for your trade right now, and for a brand-new business with zero search ranking, that can be tempting - sometimes worth a short, capped trial to fill early gaps. But go in with eyes open: pros report leads shared with several competitors at once, leads that never respond, and refund requests for bad leads that get denied. One BBB complaint about Angi put it plainly: leads were supposed to go to "no more than three to five contractors," but the customer on the other end said they had been "contacted by nearly ten different companies." That is one filing, not a statistic - but it is exactly the pattern to plan a budget cap around, not to discover after the charges hit. (More detail, and more of what pros actually report, in Angi and Thumbtack lead fees.)

The budgeting rule that keeps this from becoming a leak: set a firm dollar ceiling before you start, track what you booked against what you paid, and treat it as a short experiment while your own site and reviews build - not a permanent cost you accept because everyone else pays it too.

Paid ads: the same rule, later

Google or Facebook ads work the same way as paid leads from a budgeting angle - variable cost, real risk of paying for clicks that go nowhere - with the added requirement that you already need somewhere good for that click to land. If you are choosing between a website and an ad budget with the same limited dollars, the website wins, because ad clicks should be landing on a site you own anyway. The fuller comparison is in should you spend on ads or build a website first.

A simple way to sequence the first year

Nothing here requires guessing at a big first-year total. It requires spending the free things first, committing early to the one predictable cost, and only ever putting real money behind a paid channel once you can measure what it returns.

Budgeting mistakes that are easy to make

1. Paying for leads or ads before there is a website to send them to. The click or the referral has nowhere good to land, and the money is spent either way.
2. Signing a 12-month website contract before a single dollar of revenue is proven. A new business does not yet know what it needs a year from now - a month-to-month cost with no setup fee protects the option to change course.
3. Treating a paid lead platform as the whole marketing plan instead of a capped test alongside free channels that keep compounding after the paid test ends.
4. Skipping the website "until things are busier." Busy is exactly when there is no time left to build it - and it is the moment a missing website costs the most, because that is when word of mouth is finally sending people to look you up.

Where RunCabin sits

We built RunCabin's done-for-you websites to be the safe, predictable line in a first-year budget: $39.99/mo, flat, all-in - the site built for you, your domain, professional email, and a free AI logo included, no setup fee and no contract. Every inquiry lands straight in your inbox with no per-lead fee, so it never competes with a paid-leads test for the same dollars - it is the foundation those dollars point at. And because there is no contract, budgeting for it is just one line: the same $39.99 every month, for as long as you want it.

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Related reading: how much does a small-business website cost in 2026? · Angi and Thumbtack lead fees · should you spend on ads or build a website first?