Home Builder Marketers is a marketing agency. We run web for fifty four home builders, contractors, and construction companies across North America. Our job is to make their sites visible, fast, and converting. Speed is one third of that job.
The original setup
For the first two years, our speed stack was the same as everyone else's at our scale:
- WP Rocket on every site, $59 per year per site
- ShortPixel for image compression
- Cloudflare Free in front
- Manual PSI checks once a week, copy pasted into a Google Sheet
That worked. Sites averaged 75 mobile PSI. Most clients did not notice. The ones who did asked us to do better.
The NitroPack year
We moved twenty of the most performance sensitive sites to NitroPack on the Pro tier. Per site cost about $23 per month at agency volume. Mobile PSI moved to the high eighties on most sites. INP dropped. Clients were happier.
Within nine months we had hit two limits.
- The bill. Twenty sites at $23 was already $5,500 per year. Scaling to all fifty four meant roughly $15,000 annually.
- The pageview cap. Fast growing clients started bumping into per tier pageview limits. The fix was always to upgrade the tier, never to reduce charges. The pricing only ever went up.
And the dashboard, while pretty, gave us less operational data than we wanted. We could not export audit history. We could not bulk apply rule changes across the fleet. We could not white label.
The realization
The optimization rules are not a secret. Critical CSS, unused CSS, JS delay, image opt, page cache, smart purge: these are well documented techniques implemented in dozens of open source tools. NitroPack's value is the orchestration: a control plane that runs the optimizations continuously, reacts to changes, and presents the data cleanly.
Orchestration we know how to build.
The decision
We started in late February 2026. The brief was simple. Match NitroPack on outcomes. Replace the per pageview pricing with a flat per site cost. Make the data ours. Self host where it makes economic sense, pay only where it does not.
The build
Eight weeks from first commit to production on every HBM client site. The stack:
- Node 22 control plane on our existing VPS
- Postgres for persistence, Redis for queues, BullMQ for jobs
- Puppeteer for headless Chrome runs (Lighthouse, Penthouse for critical CSS, Coverage for unused CSS)
- imgproxy in Docker for image optimization, behind Cloudflare
- WordPress agent plugin signed with HMAC, modeled after our existing security connector
- Next.js 15 dashboard with a custom design system
The numbers
For our fifty four packaged sites:
- NitroPack at Agency tier: $1,374 per month, $16,488 per year
- HBM Rocket: roughly $80 per month for image bandwidth, $0 for everything else, $1,000 per year
- Mobile PSI median across the fleet: 89 (was 81 on NitroPack, 71 before that)
- Build time: 8 weeks, one engineer
Why we are offering it
We built this for ourselves. After running it internally for a few months we realized other agencies in our position would want it. So we are opening it up. Free tier for one site, paid tiers when you are ready, self hosted on the Enterprise plan.
If you read this and the math works for your agency too, we would love to talk.