Fixing an inaccessible website often costs more than replacing it

A $300,000 budget and a $70,000 number

In May 2026 the U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy sat down with the National Association of Towns and Townships to hear how the Department of Justice's web accessibility rule was landing in small communities. The write-up is short and worth reading in full. One line from it has stayed with us:

An attendee explained that a town with a $300,000 operating budget cannot afford even a "low-end" DOJ estimate of $70,000 for website compliance.

That is nearly a quarter of everything the town spends in a year, for a website. No town names were given, and we are not going to invent one. But the shape of that number will be familiar to anyone who has asked a vendor what compliance would cost.

What follows is our attempt to take that number apart honestly — to show where it comes from, where it is often inflated, and what the alternative actually costs. We build municipal websites, so we have an obvious interest in the answer. We have tried to write this so that you can check every step of it yourself, and we have deliberately included the parts that point the other way.

What a remediation quote is made of

Accessibility remediation is not one service. It is four or five, stacked. Most vendors do not publish rates at all; a few do, and those published rate cards are the only defensible basis for an estimate, so they are what we use here.

Two things jump out of that table. The first is the spread on page remediation: one published card quotes $100–$300 a page, another $350–$550, another works to roughly $400. That is not vendors being dishonest — it reflects genuinely different work. A page with three headings and a paragraph is not a page with a nested data table and a booking form.

The second is the line everyone underestimates.

The sleeper cost: your PDFs

A municipal website is, functionally, a filing cabinet with a homepage attached. Agendas. Minutes. The budget. Bylaws and ordinances. Permit applications. Zoning maps. Assessment rolls. Tender documents. Council packets that run to two hundred pages because somebody scanned the appendices.

Document remediation is priced per page of document, in the region of $4 to $10 depending on complexity, with forms and scanned images at the expensive end. That sounds cheap right up until you multiply it by a filing cabinet.

This is how a website compliance quote reaches $70,000 without anyone padding it. It isn't the website. It's the cabinet.

The exception that changes the arithmetic

Here is the part that is against our commercial interest to tell you, which is exactly why we are telling you.

The DOJ rule contains five exceptions, and the second one is decisive for your budget: pre-existing electronic documents. Documents you posted before your compliance date do not have to be retroactively remediated — unless they are still being used to apply for, access, or participate in a service, program or activity.

So the question is not "how many PDFs do we have?" It is "how many of our PDFs are still load-bearing?"

• The 2019 zoning variance application that residents still download and submit? Load-bearing. It is a live part of a public program. It needs to be accessible.
• The current fee schedule, the dog licence form, the building permit checklist, the tax deferral application? Load-bearing.
• The minutes of the March 2017 council meeting, which nobody transacts with and which exist as a record? Not load-bearing. Pre-existing. Exempt.
• Eleven years of agenda packets in a "Meeting Archive" folder? Almost certainly the same — and if they are properly identified and unchanged, the archived-content exception may cover them too.

In our experience the load-bearing set is dramatically smaller than the total set. A town with 500 documents on its website very often has fewer than fifty that anyone actually uses to do something. If forty documents averaging five pages are your real scope, that is 200 pages — $800 to $2,000, not $25,000.

That single conversation can take a five-figure line item down to a four-figure one. It costs you nothing but an afternoon with a spreadsheet, and it is the highest-return hour of work available to you on this whole file.

When remediation wins. Plainly.

We are not going to pretend the answer is always "buy a new website," because it isn't, and you would be right not to trust us if we said so.

Fix what you have if:

• The site is modern and well-structured. If it was built in the last few years on a current platform, uses real headings, real landmarks, real form labels, and it is responsive — the bones are fine. What you have is a maintenance problem, not an architecture problem.
• Your CMS produces clean markup. If the templates emit conformant HTML and your editors have simply been pasting in unlabelled images and low-contrast buttons, that is a training-and-cleanup job. It is cheap. Do it.
• Your document library is small or mostly archival. The arithmetic above cuts both ways: if you have thirty load-bearing PDFs, the sleeper cost isn't sleeping.
• The site is new. If your council signed off a redesign eighteen months ago, going back for another one is a political non-starter, and rightly so. Remediate it and get the vendor to fix what they should have delivered.

In those cases an audit plus targeted fixes plus a half-day of staff training will land somewhere in the low thousands, and replacing the site would be waste. Say no to us. We would rather lose the sale than sell you something you don't need.

When replacement wins

Replace it if:

• The platform itself generates the failures. This is the decisive one. If the theme, the widgets, or the CMS's own output produce non-conformant markup — unlabelled navigation, div-soup instead of headings, calendars and agenda modules that a keyboard cannot operate — then no amount of content fixing helps. Your staff cannot fix code they do not control. You will pay for remediation, pass an audit, take the next platform update, and fail again. That is renting a problem.
• You have a large live document library. Remediating documents one by one is a cost you incur forever, because next month there is another agenda. A site that publishes agendas, minutes and notices as accessible HTML pages — with the PDF as an optional download rather than the only copy — stops the pile growing. That is a structural fix, and it is worth more over five years than any one-time cleanup.
• The site is near end-of-life anyway. If you were going to replace it in two or three years regardless, spending $20,000–$40,000 remediating it first is spending twice.
• Remediation costs approach replacement cost. At that point you are paying new-site money to keep an old site — and on most subscription platforms, to keep paying the subscription too.

The comparison, at last

A new Munikit site is $17,500 to $27,500, all-in, one-time. That includes design, build, content migration, training, and launch. It is built to WCAG 2.1 Level AA from the first line of markup rather than corrected toward it afterwards, and it goes live in six to eight weeks. The code is delivered to your own git repository, the content is in your own database, and there is no annual platform fee holding the site hostage. We offer an optional annual renewal for updates and support — and if you let it lapse, your website keeps running. Our pricing page lays out the whole model, and the savings calculator will run your own numbers over five years.

Set that beside the number from the SBA session. A $70,000 compliance spend on a site you will still be renting next year, versus a $17,500–$27,500 one-time spend on a site you own, that is accessible by design, and that stops generating the problem.

That is not a close call. But it is also not universal — and if your situation is the one three sections above, where the site is sound and the documents are few, the close call goes the other way and you should keep your money.

What to do this month

1. Count your load-bearing documents. Not the library. The ones a resident uses to apply for, pay for, or participate in something. This is the single number that most changes your budget.
2. Run a free automated scan — and then distrust it. It will find real problems and it will miss most of them. Machine-detectable failures are a minority of WCAG failures. A clean automated report is not a compliant website.
3. Establish whether the platform can even get there. Ask your current vendor, in writing, for a conformance report (a VPAT or ACR) for the version of the product you are running. Their answer, and how long it takes, tells you most of what you need to know.
4. Get the remediation quote itemised. Audit, page fixes, document pages, re-test, training — separately. A single lump sum cannot be evaluated, and cannot be defended to a council.
5. Compare against replacement before you sign. Not because we want you to buy from us. Because it is the comparison a councillor will ask you for, and you should have it ready.
6. Be sceptical of overlay widgets. The JavaScript toolbar that promises compliance for a small monthly fee does not fix the underlying markup, is widely criticised by disabled users, and has not prevented litigation. Our accessibility page says more.

If it is any comfort, almost nobody is finished. WebAIM's annual survey of a million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, with government home pages averaging around 36 errors each. You are not behind your peers. You are simply at the point where the arithmetic has to be done, and done honestly.

If you want a second opinion on which side of the line you fall — genuinely, including the answer where we tell you to keep what you have — send us the URL. And if you want to know what "accessible" concretely means before anyone quotes you for it, work through our WCAG 2.1 AA checklist for municipal websites.

Rates quoted here are published market rates from third-party vendors, current as of July 2026, and are used for comparison only — they are not our prices and not a quote. This page is a guide, not legal advice.