# Court reporting website design: what it costs, and what I built for Workhorse Court Reporting

> A court reporting website costs somewhere between $159 and a few thousand dollars up front. Court Reporter 360, one of only two shops in the country that builds for this profession and the only one that publishes a number, charges $159 for a single-page site including the first twelve months of hosting. I charge $750 one time, $49/month for care and hosting, and you own every line of code, the domain and every account at launch. Over five years theirs is about $679 and mine is about $3,690 — so if you're a solo reporter who needs one page, buy theirs and stop reading.

I build websites for small businesses out of Blue Springs, Missouri. One of my clients is Workhorse Court Reporting Services in Independence — she does transcript proofreading and scoping, so she works *for* reporters rather than taking depositions herself. Close enough to the world to learn its shape, far enough that I'm not going to pretend I've been in it for a decade. Building her site is what sent me looking at what everybody else charges in this profession, and what I found was strange enough that I wrote it all down.

## Nobody has written this page

I searched "court reporting firm website design" on 8 August 2026. The first page came back as Steno, Magna, NNRC, PohlmanUSA, A Plus Reporting, Esquire, Acclaim — court reporting agencies and their software, not people who build websites for them — plus two generic law-firm web design pages that have nothing to do with reporters. Court Reporter 360 sat at number five. That's it.

Same day, "pressure washing website design cost" returned eight dedicated agency landing pages fighting over the top ten. That's what a normal commercial search looks like. This one has two occupants, and one of them won't tell you a price.

## The wrong first question

When Workhorse hired me the first thing we talked about was what the site should look like. Wrong first question. I didn't know that yet either.

A pressure washing company's website has to convince a stranger to trust them with a house. A tattoo shop's site has to show work. Those are persuasion problems, and design carries most of the weight.

Court reporting isn't that. The person landing on your site is usually a paralegal with a deposition to cover, a date and a caption. She isn't browsing. She isn't comparing your typography to anybody else's. She has a task with a deadline, and your website either lets her finish it or it makes her pick up the phone.

So the real question is whether she can hand you the job, completely, without talking to you. That's the whole product. A court reporting website isn't a brochure — it's an intake form with a homepage attached. Once you accept that, most of the other decisions make themselves.

## What the intake form actually has to capture

Lexitas, one of the big national agencies, publishes a list of what legal teams should have ready before scheduling a deposition. Eight items, in their words:

1. Date, time, and time zone

2. Witness name and contact information

3. Attorney appearances

4. Case caption and matter number

5. Location or remote access details

6. Expected duration

7. Transcript turnaround needs

8. Special technology requests

Magna Legal Services goes further. Their "Schedule a Deposition" form runs six steps. Required: first name, last name, email, firm name, firm address, type of proceeding, remote or in-person or telephonic, number of attorneys noticed, date, start time, end time, time zone, deponent names, and deposition location name. Optional: upload the notice, noticing attorney and their email, case caption, location address, and a whole block for the corporate client or insurance carrier — adjuster name, adjuster email, adjuster address, claim number, file number, name of insured, date of loss. Then a final step of checkboxes for videographer, interpreter, realtime hookup, rough draft, streaming and conference room.

That's the actual shape of the job, published by two companies that schedule depositions for a living.

Now go look at what's on most court reporting websites. Name. Email. Phone. Message.

A four-field contact form doesn't collect a job. It collects a request to have a conversation about a job. Somebody has to email back and ask what the caption is, then ask whether they need realtime, then ask whether it's remote and on what platform. That's three round trips and a day and a half before anything hits a calendar, and in the meantime the paralegal called the agency whose form asked the right questions the first time.

It's cheap to fix, too. A form that asks the right fourteen things isn't harder to build than a form that asks four. It's just a form somebody had to think about for an afternoon. Most people didn't.

## The two shops that build only for court reporters

There are two, and they're nothing alike.

**NextClient** has a dedicated "Court Reporter Website Design" page. They were founded by lawyers, they work with law firms all day, and they market online deposition scheduling and staff recruitment to reporting firms. They publish no prices at all. Every button on the page is "Request Proposal" or "Free Consultation." If you want a number you call 800-410-6398 and ask a salesperson for it.

**Court Reporter 360** does the thing almost nobody in my industry does — it puts the numbers on the page. Straight from their own FAQ and plan pages as of 8 August 2026:

- **Standard** — "Get the Standard Web Page Design plus 12-Month Standard Hosting Plan for just $159." Single page. Renewal is $130/year.

- **Flex** — same deal at $199, renewing at $190/year. Adds self-service editing, one domain email account, and the ability to view and export your scheduler entries.

- **Agency** — $300 for the home page design, $200 for each additional page, $300 for the initial hosting and services package, $360/year to renew.

- **Email** — Rackspace at $36 per user per year, Office 365 at $96 per user per year. Aliases and forwarding are free.

I'll say what the $159 buys, because it's a real product: responsive design, SSL, cloud hosting with automatic backups, click-to-call, and a "Schedule A Reporter" form that, per their own page, "alerts you via email and/or text message the second it is submitted." Somebody over there understood the same thing I just spent 500 words on.

Notice what separates Standard from Flex. Forty dollars, and one of the things it buys is seeing your own scheduler entries in a list. On the $159 plan, bookings arrive as alerts and that's the end of it. An email in your inbox at 4:40 on a Friday isn't a schedule. A list you can sort and export is a schedule. That's a small, specific, honest example of what I mean when I say the intake system is the product — their pricing is built around exactly that line.

## What I charge

My [pricing](/pricing) is published for the same reason theirs is. A number you can be held to is worth more than a discovery call.

- Custom site: **$750 one time**, or $100/month for twelve months if you'd rather spread it.

- Care and hosting: **$49/month**, month to month.

- Out-of-plan work: **$100/hour**.

- Local SEO, only if you want it: from $250/month. Most solo reporters don't need it.

Two bits of arithmetic I'd rather you get from me than work out later. Financing costs more — $100 × 12 is $1,200 against $750 paid once, so spreading it costs you $450, which is 60% more. And the five-year total on my side is $750 + ($588 × 5) = **$3,690**.

You own every line of code, the domain and all the accounts at launch. Not "we'll transfer it if you ask." Yours on day one. I work remotely at the same fixed prices, so it doesn't matter whether you're in Independence or Sacramento.

## If you're a solo reporter, buy the $159 plan

If you take most of your work from two or three agencies, and what you need is a page with your certifications, your coverage area and a phone number so attorneys can confirm you're real — buy the Standard plan. Today. Don't read the rest of this post.

The math isn't close and I'm not going to pretend it is. Five years on their Standard plan is $159 plus four renewals at $130, which is **$679**. Five years with me at full freight is **$3,690**. I am 5.4 times more expensive over five years for a solo reporter who needs one page. There's no version of that sentence that helps me. It's still the sentence.

Anybody who tells you a solo freelancer needs a $3,000 website is selling you something. Same as I've said about Wix and Squarespace — cheap is often just correct.

## Where it stops being the right call

Run the same five years on a six-page agency site at their published list. Design is $300 + ($200 × 5) = $1,300. Add $300 for the first year of hosting and services, then four renewals at $360. Total: **$3,040**. Mine is $3,690. That's $650 over sixty months — about eleven dollars a month.

Year one, I'm actually cheaper: $1,338 against their $1,600.

But I have to flag something, because the comparison isn't as clean as that table makes it look. Their agency page advertises "the Agency Website Design plus 12-Month Agency Hosting Plan for up to 70% off our regular price," and it doesn't publish the discounted figure. If a firm actually gets 70% off, their five-year number drops to somewhere near $1,920 and the gap widens to about thirty dollars a month. So the honest range is that at agency scale I'm eleven to thirty dollars a month more expensive, and I can't narrow it because the real price isn't published.

Which means price isn't the argument at agency scale. Ownership is.

Here's their FAQ, verbatim, on whether they'll install your site on another server:

"No. There are several reasons for this: Depending on the website, we may be using proprietary software that we have developed. In order to protect our intellectual property we will not install it on another server we cannot control."

That's a completely honest answer and I'm not accusing anybody of hiding anything — they said it out loud on their own FAQ page, which is more than most shops do. Their FAQ doesn't address who owns the website either way, which isn't the same as saying you don't. But understand what the migration answer means in practice. Your scheduling form — the thing I've just argued is your actual product — runs on their software, on their server, and it doesn't leave. If you ever want to move, you don't migrate. You rebuild.

My side: code, domain, accounts, handed over at launch, in writing on the pricing page. If you fire me you keep a working website. That's what the eleven to thirty dollars buys.

I've made this argument in other trades. A $500 template site isn't cheap, it's rented — you didn't save money, you rented a problem. Same shape here, just with a much more reasonable landlord.

## The things a generalist agency doesn't know to ask you

I'm not going to pretend I've been in this vertical for a decade. I have one client in it. But building for her meant learning the shape of the profession, and there are a few things a general-purpose shop gets wrong every time.

**Credentials aren't decoration.** NCRA administers eight certifications — RSR, RPR, RMR, RDR, CRR, CRC, CRI and CLVS. Per NCRA's own statistics page, updated 18 March 2026, only 4,776 people hold the RPR and 2,011 hold the CRR. A generalist drops those in the footer in small grey text. They belong wherever the booking decision happens, because a paralegal looking for realtime is specifically looking for CRR — and she may not know that's what the letters mean. Spell each one out once, in plain English.

**State certification is a real filter.** Missouri Courts states it plainly: effective January 1, 2002, all court reporters, whether official or free-lance, must be certified in accordance with Supreme Court Rule 14. If you're a Missouri CCR, that goes above the fold, not buried on an About page.

**Coverage is geographic, and it's counties.** "Kansas City metro" is useless to somebody scheduling in Jackson, Clay, Platte, Cass or Johnson County. One page per county you actually cover, organized the way work is actually assigned — not forty thin city pages that say the same thing with the name swapped.

**Rates, or at least the shape of rates.** Per-page rate, appearance fee, expedite tiers, videography, remote platform fee. You don't have to publish the numbers. You do have to acknowledge the categories exist, because "call for pricing" on a site with nothing else on it reads as "we're going to make this up."

One more, in the interest of not overselling. Court Reporter 360's homepage claims "85% of new work via a court reporter's website comes from out of town." I can't verify that — they don't cite a source, and neither can you. The direction is plausible, since out-of-state counsel is exactly who has to find a local reporter cold. But treat it as a marketing claim, not a statistic. Which is how you should treat any number on a web design site that doesn't say where it came from. Including mine.

To their credit, their published case study does say where its numbers came from: Circle City Reporting went from 10 Google visitors in the 28 days before the rebuild to 20 in the 28 days after, and load time went from 1.99 to 0.828 — they wrote "milliseconds," and I'll assume they meant seconds. Ten to twenty. They published the raw counts instead of just saying "traffic doubled," and they wrote "Do we promise you the same results as Circle City Reporting? No. We can't." That's more honesty than most of this industry manages.

## Don't hire me to build a transcript repository

This is the part where I talk you out of spending money with me.

If what you actually need is attorney logins, a transcript and exhibit repository, job scheduling across a roster of reporters, reporter payroll and client billing — that's agency management software, and it already exists. ReporterBase publishes its pricing: RB9 is $250/month for the server and one user, $70/month per additional user, with 100GB of repository storage. RB9 Lite is $150/month. The RB Connect plug-in, which is the attorney-facing portal, is $220/month per URL.

So a full portal runs about $470/month on top of your website. Call it $5,640 a year. At my $100/hour, $5,640 buys 56 hours of my time. You aren't getting a secure multi-tenant transcript repository with permissions, audit trails and billing for 56 hours. Nobody is. Buy the software, and hire me to make the website in front of it fast, clear and yours.

Where custom work does pay is the narrow, ugly, specific thing no vendor sells — a rate calculator, a turnaround estimator, an intake form that dumps straight into how you actually work. That's what [custom tools](/services/custom-tools) are for, at $100/hour, scoped in writing before I start.

## Is a website even going to make you money

Probably not the way you've been told, and it's worth being straight about that before you spend anything.

BLS counts 17,700 court reporters and simultaneous captioners as of 2024 and projects employment "to show little or no change from 2024 to 2034," with about 1,700 openings a year, essentially all replacement. NCRA lists 10,550 members, 7,630 of them reporters, 46% of those freelance — call it 3,500 freelancers, average age 56. Most of them work through an agency and will never buy a website. That's the entire reason this niche has two occupants instead of forty. It's not a big enough pie for an agency with sales staff. It's exactly the right size for one guy with fixed prices.

Meanwhile there aren't enough of you. The Judicial Council of California's own fact sheet counts 4,587 active California-licensed reporters living in the state as of 1 January 2025, a 20.9% decline in total licensees between FY 2013–14 and FY 2022–23, 68 new licenses issued statewide in 2022–23, and eight recognized training programs left where there were 17 in 2010. Between October 2023 and September 2024, of 1,789,845 reported family, probate and unlimited civil hearings in California, an estimated 1,281,770 had no verbatim record at all. That's 71.6%.

So: if you're a working reporter already turning away jobs, a website is not going to make you money by generating leads, because leads aren't your constraint. Buy one as a credibility page and a scheduling tool that saves you phone calls. Buy it for that reason or don't buy it. Any shop that tells you a website will fill your calendar in a profession with a documented shortage hasn't looked at the data.

The people for whom the lead argument does hold are agency owners competing against Planet Depos and Esquire for the same regional work, and reporters building a direct-to-attorney book so they can stop splitting fees. If that's you, the pages and the intake form are the whole point. It's also worth making sure the language models can read your site properly, since out-of-state counsel finding a local reporter cold is now as often an LLM question as a Google one — I wrote about getting recommended by ChatGPT separately.

## If you scope or proofread, nobody has written you anything at all

Worth saying, because it surprised me.

Search "court reporting website design" and you get a thin SERP with two occupants. Search for the same thing aimed at scopists and transcript proofreaders and you get nothing. Not a thin field — an empty one. I ran it on 8 August 2026 and page one was training courses (Knowadays, Christine B. Smith's master class), a transcript-management platform (Stenovate), a proofreader directory on stenosearch, NCRA's own explainer page on what a scopist is, and Wikipedia. Not one web design company. Not one.

I'm not going to oversell that. There aren't many of you, most work through relationships rather than search, and a page that ranks first for something nobody types is worth exactly as much as a page that ranks fortieth. Being the only answer to a question nobody asks is still being nobody's answer.

But the practical version is real enough. If you scope or proofread and you've been trying to work out what a site should cost you, the honest answer is that the general-purpose numbers apply — nobody has built a specialist market around you, so there's no specialist premium to pay either. Buy on the same terms as everyone else: a fixed number up front, and you own the thing at the end.

The one piece that is different is the pricing math. Reporters sell appearances and pages. You sell pages and turnaround, which is a two-variable problem the customer can't do in their head. That's a calculator, and it's the same calculator whether you're proofing, scoping, or transcribing. Which is exactly what I ended up building.

## What I built for Workhorse Court Reporting

Workhorse Court Reporting Services is in Independence, Missouri, about twelve minutes from my desk. She proofreads and scopes transcripts for court reporters — so she sits on the other side of the desk from most of the people reading this. The case study is on my [work page](/work) and the site is at workhorsecrs.com.

Her problem was the one I've been circling this whole post. Proofreading and scoping get priced by the page and by the turnaround, which is exactly the arithmetic a prospective client can't see before they get in touch. So every single inquiry started the same way: how many pages, how fast do you need it, let me work that out and get back to you. Two or three emails before anyone knew whether they could afford her.

So I built the calculator. Pick proofing or scoping, pick a turnaround tier, type in a page count, and it itemises the estimate on the page while you type. It also models the thing that actually happens in her work — a scoped file grows — so it carries a page-growth cushion and an overage rate rather than quoting a number that turns out to be wrong later. That's 252 lines of vanilla JavaScript with no dependencies at all. Currency formats properly, tap targets are big enough for a phone.

Eight pages, hand-coded. No WordPress, no page builder, no build step. Fraunces and Inter for the type, self-hosted so nothing phones out to a font CDN. WebP images with a JPG fallback. Hand-written JSON-LD on every page — ProfessionalService, Service, FAQ, Breadcrumb. Security headers locked down: HSTS, a strict content-security-policy, clickjacking and permissions shut off. An llms.txt so the language models can read it without guessing. It's on Netlify. About four days of work end to end.

Here's what it measures, against the median Kansas City small-business site. Google's throttled mobile test, run 1 August 2026:

- Mobile performance: **100** — median 55

- Accessibility: **100** — median 89

- SEO: **100** — median 92

- Best practices: **100** — median 96

- Largest Contentful Paint: **1.7s** — median 10.0s

That right-hand figure comes from [the 105 sites I measured across Kansas City](/blog/state-of-kc-small-business-websites-2026/), and I'd rather be honest about what it means: that's the lab test, deliberately throttled, not what a real visitor on a decent phone gets. It's a stress test. But it's also the only number that exists for most small sites, because they don't get enough traffic for Google to collect real-user data — Workhorse included. In that survey only 7.6% of sites scored 90 or above. Four hundreds isn't a brag about my talent. It's what you get when there's nothing on the page that doesn't need to be there.

One thing I won't claim: I don't have a before-and-after on her inquiry volume. She'd have to give me that and I haven't asked. What I know is what she stopped doing, which was answering the same two emails about page counts every time somebody wanted a number.

## If your booking form asks for a name and a message

If you run a court reporting firm and your website's booking form asks for a name and a message, that's the fix, and it isn't an expensive one. Tell me how many reporters are in your firm, what counties you cover, and whether you need real intake or just pages, and I'll quote a fixed price that won't move. Send me the details, or call 816-772-5917. If you'd rather see how I price things generally first, the Kansas City website cost breakdown runs the same arithmetic for everybody else.

## At a glance

Court Reporter 360 figures are from their published FAQ and plan pages, checked 8 August 2026. The Standard and Agency offers are both flagged there as limited-time, and the agency tier advertises up to 70% off with no discounted number published, so check before you rely on any of it. Mine are on my pricing page and I don't run limited-time offers.

Every source listed at the end of this post was checked on 8 August 2026 as well.

## At a glance

| Line item | CR360 Standard | CR360 Agency (6 pages) | NextClient | 2k Web Developments |

| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

| Year one | $159 | $1,600 at published list | Not published | $1,338 ($750 + $588 hosting) |

| Ongoing | $130/yr | $360/yr | Not published | $49/mo, month to month |

| Five-year total | $679 | ~$3,040 at list, less if discounted | Not published | $3,690 |

| Pages | One | Six as priced | Not stated | As many as the job needs |

| Booking form | Yes, email/SMS alerts | Yes, plus admin panel | "Online deposition scheduling" | Built to your fields |

| See and export your bookings | Flex plan ($199) and up | Yes | Not stated | Yes |

| Edit your own pages | Flex and up | Yes, WordPress | Not stated | Yes, or I do it under care |

| Business email | $36–$96/user/yr extra | One account included | Not stated | Your accounts, your choice |

| Move it to another host | "No." Their FAQ, verbatim | "No." | Not stated | Yours at launch, go anywhere |

| Who owns the code | Not stated on their site | Not stated on their site | Not stated | You do, every line, at launch |

| Custom tools (calculators, estimators) | Not offered | Not offered | Not stated | $100/hr, quoted before I start |

| Works in this profession | Yes | Yes | Yes | One client — a proofreader and scopist |

## Sources

- [Court Reporter 360 — FAQ](https://courtreporter360.com/faq.php) — Court Reporter 360 (Checked 8 August 2026. Source of the migration answer quoted verbatim, and of the email pricing.)

- [Court Reporter 360 — Standard plan](https://courtreporter360.com/standard.php) — Court Reporter 360 (Checked 8 August 2026. $159 including twelve months of hosting; $130/year to renew. Flagged on the page as a limited-time offer.)

- [Court Reporter 360 — Agency plan](https://courtreporter360.com/agency.php) — Court Reporter 360 (Checked 8 August 2026. $300 home page, $200 per extra page, $300 initial hosting, $360/year renewal — and an "up to 70% off" offer with no discounted figure published.)

- [Court Reporter 360 — case study](https://courtreporter360.com/case-study.php) — Court Reporter 360 (Checked 8 August 2026. The Circle City Reporting counts, and their own "we can't promise you the same results" line.)

- [Court Reporter Website Design](https://www.nextclient.com/clients/court-reporter-website-design/) — NextClient (Checked 8 August 2026. No prices anywhere on the page.)

- [What to Know Before Scheduling a Deposition](https://www.lexitaslegal.com/resources/what-to-know-before-scheduling-a-deposition) — Lexitas (The eight-item list, in their words.)

- [Schedule a Deposition](https://magnals.com/schedule-a-deposition/) — Magna Legal Services (The six-step form the required-fields list is read off.)

- [Occupational Outlook Handbook — Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/court-reporters.htm) — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (17,700 jobs as of 2024; "little or no change" projected to 2034.)

- [NCRA Statistics](https://www.ncra.org/home/about-ncra/NCRA-Statistics) — National Court Reporters Association (Updated 18 March 2026 — membership, freelance share and the RPR/CRR certification holder counts.)

- [NCRA Certifications](https://www.ncra.org/certification) — National Court Reporters Association (The eight certifications and what each one means.)

- [Fact Sheet: Shortage of Certified Shorthand Reporters](https://courts.ca.gov/system/files/file/court-reporter-fact-sheet-jan-2025.pdf) — Judicial Council of California (January 2025. Active licensees, the licence decline, and the share of hearings with no verbatim record.)

- [Court Reporters](https://www.courts.mo.gov/page.jsp?id=355) — Missouri Courts (Supreme Court Rule 14 certification, effective 1 January 2002.)

- [RB9 pricing guide](https://www.omti.com/rb/products/pricing-guide.html) — OMTI / ReporterBase (Checked 8 August 2026. RB9, RB9 Lite and the RB Connect portal.)

- [Attorney Website Costs: Budgeting and Maximizing ROI](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/resources/law-technology-today/2024/attorney-website-costs-budgeting-and-maximizing-roi/) — American Bar Association (The legal-industry ranges the FAQ compares this vertical against.)

## Frequently asked questions

**How much does a court reporting website cost?**

Between $159 and a few thousand dollars up front. The floor is Court Reporter 360's $159 Standard plan, single page, first year of hosting included. Mine is $750 one time plus $49/month. For context, the American Bar Association's own guidance on attorney website costs puts custom-designed sites at $3,000–$20,000+, freelance web designers at $1,000–$5,000+, and says client portals can add $1,500–$5,000+ on top of that. This vertical is priced well below the legal industry it serves.

**Should a solo freelance reporter get a website at all?**

Only if you want it to do something. If your calendar is full through agency work, a site is a credibility page, not a lead source, and $159 buys that adequately. If you're trying to book attorneys directly, the site has to take a deposition request properly, and that's where a custom build starts earning its money.

**Can you put deposition scheduling on my own site instead of a third-party tool?**

Yes. That's custom tools work — a form that collects proceeding type, remote or in-person, date, start and end time, time zone, deponent names, location, number of attorneys noticed, turnaround, billing contact and an upload for the notice, validated and routed to whoever schedules. On your domain, no per-seat fee. If you want it wired into scheduling software you already use, tell me what you use and I'll tell you honestly whether it has an API before you pay me anything.

**Can you build a transcript delivery portal?**

I can, and usually I'll tell you not to pay me for it. ReporterBase's RB Connect portal is $220/month on top of $250/month for RB9. Buying that is cheaper and safer than commissioning one. I build the public site in front of it.

**Do I own the website?**

On my builds, yes — every line of code, the domain and all the accounts, at launch. If you leave, you take it. I'd ask that question in writing of anyone you hire. Court Reporter 360's FAQ doesn't address ownership either way, but it does say plainly they won't install your site on another server, so plan accordingly.

**Do I have to be in Kansas City to hire you?**

No. I'm in Blue Springs, Missouri, and I work remotely nationwide at the same published prices. A build doesn't require me in the room. Jurisdiction matters for your business, not for mine.

**Is $750 the real number or a starting point?**

It's the real number for a straightforward build. It scales with scope — more pages, or a custom tool like Workhorse's calculator, costs more, and I quote it in writing before you commit. Anything outside a fixed quote is $100/hour. There's no discovery fee, no strategy retainer, and no number I'm holding back until the second call.

Source: https://2kwebdev.com/blog/court-reporting-website-design-cost/