Let’s get the bias out of the way immediately.

We build custom websites for therapy practices. Brighter Vision and TherapySites also build websites for therapy practices. So when we tell you what we think of them, you should absolutely factor in that we would like your business.

Now that we’ve said the quiet part, here’s the actually useful version.

Because we have inherited a lot of these sites. Migrated them, untangled them, occasionally performed CPR on them. We’ve seen what’s under the hood, and we’ve watched what happens when a therapist decides to leave. Some of it is fine. Some of it is genuinely worth knowing before you sign anything.

The part where we say something nice

They are convenient. Truly.

If you are opening a practice next month and the words “domain registrar” make you want to lie down, a subscription service solves a real problem. You get online fast. Somebody else handles the hosting. There’s a support email. For a solo therapist who wants a functional website and never wants to think about it again, that is a legitimate answer.

If that’s you, stop reading. You have our blessing. Go be hands-off.

Everyone else, keep going.

The pricing has changed a lot, and not in your direction

When we first wrote about these platforms, Brighter Vision ran roughly $69 to $149 a month.

As of 2026, plans run $99 to $349 a month plus a $100 setup fee. Reporting across the industry puts the increases somewhere between 43% and 134% over 2024 and 2025. The premium tier lands north of $4,000 a year.

TherapySites starts lower, but SEO is an add-on at around $40 a month, and a lot of what you’d assume is included turns out to be a line item.

Do the five-year math on that, because nobody does and it’s the whole ballgame.

At $199 a month, five years is $11,940. At $349, it’s $20,940 plus setup. And at the end of those five years, you have paid roughly the price of a house down payment for a website you do not own.

A custom build costs more on day one and then stops costing. That’s the entire argument, and it’s just arithmetic.

“Custom design” is doing some heavy lifting

These platforms market custom design. What you get is a template with your colors and your logo in it.

We know this because we’ve opened them up. And because we’ve had the deeply awkward experience of showing a client their new site and having them say “wait, that looks like the practice down the road.” Reader, it did. Same layout, same stock photo of a woman looking pensively out a window, same everything but the sage green.

Swapping a hex code is not customization. It’s a costume.

For some practices that genuinely doesn’t matter. If you’re the only EMDR therapist in your county, your website could be a beige rectangle and you’d still fill your caseload. But if you’re in a competitive metro, looking exactly like your competitors is not a neutral choice. We wrote more about that in Looks Aren’t Everything.

The ownership thing, which is the one that actually matters

Here’s the question almost nobody asks before signing: if I leave, what do I take with me?

The honest answer with most subscription platforms is: your domain, if you registered it yourself. Maybe your text, if you wrote it. And that’s roughly it.

The design isn’t yours. The build isn’t yours. Any content they wrote for you isn’t yours. You’ve been renting, and when you stop paying rent the apartment is not yours to take.

We have watched therapists discover this at the worst possible moment. They’re mid-move, they’ve already told the platform they’re leaving, and they find out the site simply evaporates on the cancellation date. No export, no files, nothing to hand a new designer.

You are not being scammed. It’s in the terms. It’s just that nobody reads terms at 11pm while starting a business.

Before you sign anything, ask three questions in writing:

Do I own the design files if I cancel? Can I export my site content, and in what format? Is my domain registered to me or to you?

Get the answers in an email. Not a phone call.

This is why full ownership is non-negotiable for us. When we finish a build, it’s yours. Files, hosting logins, all of it. If you fire us next week, you keep the website. That is not generosity, it’s just what should be normal.

The SEO included in your plan

Every one of these platforms includes SEO. Which sounds great until you ask what “SEO” means in that sentence.

Usually it means: your title tags got filled in and your site was submitted to Google. That’s setup. It’s real and it matters and it takes about an afternoon.

What it does not mean is ongoing work. Nobody is watching your rankings. Nobody notices when Google rolls out an update and your traffic drops 40%. Nobody is writing content aimed at what people in your city are actually searching for this year.

SEO is not a setting you switch on. It’s closer to a gym membership, which we’ve complained about at length elsewhere.

And at these price points, something has to give. A platform charging $199 a month across thousands of therapists cannot be doing individual keyword research for each of them. The math doesn’t work. That’s not an accusation, it’s a spreadsheet.

Nobody built these for the search engine we have now

This is the newest problem and the one we’d weight most heavily in 2026.

These platforms were designed for a version of Google that no longer exists. Google now answers questions directly at the top of the page. AI summaries absorb the click. People ask ChatGPT to find them a therapist, casually, on a Tuesday.

Ranking in that environment requires structured data, genuinely distinctive content, and a site architecture that machines can actually parse. Template sites full of shared content are close to the worst possible input.

We wrote about what changed in Understanding Google and AI Search. The short version: if your site says the same thing as four hundred other therapist sites, an AI has no reason to surface yours.

Social Genie and the shared content library

Brighter Vision offers a library of pre-written blog and social posts.

We understand the appeal. Blank page, busy week, nobody wants to write about seasonal affective disorder at 9pm.

But that content goes to every client on the platform. Which means dozens of therapist websites publishing recognizably similar posts about the same topics. Google notices. AI search notices more.

It also skips the entire point. Your blog isn’t there to fill space. It’s there so somebody at 2am, googling whether what they’re feeling is normal, lands on something that sounds like a real person who might understand them. A content library cannot do that. It doesn’t know you.

So, who should actually use these

Genuinely fine for you if: you’re brand new, budget is tight, you want zero involvement, and you’re not planning major growth. A functional template site beats no site, every time.

Probably a bad fit if: you’re in a competitive area, you’re growing or adding clinicians, you care about owning your work, or you’ve noticed your traffic quietly falling off since 2024.

What we’d tell a friend

Look at what you’ve paid so far. Not the monthly number, the total. Multiply the monthly by however many months you’ve been on it.

If that number surprises you, and you also don’t own the thing you bought, that’s worth sitting with.

You don’t need to panic or cancel today. But you should know what you’re actually in.

If you want a second opinion with no pitch attached, our free site scan will look at your website and tell you what’s actually happening with it. No email required. No call. If your site is fine, it says so, which is more than most free audits will admit to.

And if you want to talk about what a build looks like, here’s how we work. We serve solo, small group, and large group practices, and the answer is genuinely different for each.