Our landing pages start at $99. A corporate site starts at $299. Those are real prices, not anchors, and we publish them because a price you have to ask for is a price you are not allowed to compare.
But the build price is the smallest number in this decision, and almost nobody is shown the rest of it before they sign.
A website is not a purchase. It is a subscription you enter by buying something.
The build is one payment. Everything after it repeats: the hosting, the domain, the changes, the person whose job it becomes. Over five years the running cost routinely exceeds the build by several times — and unlike the build, nobody quotes it to you in advance.
This article is that quote. Every line item, what drives it up, and the two that dominate the total on almost every site we have ever seen.
The seven line items
1. Domain
$10–$40 a year, forever, and it is the single most important thing you own. A .com sits at the low end. Country domains and premium extensions run higher.
Two rules. Register it in your own name, with your own account and your own card. And turn on auto-renew, because the most expensive way to learn what a domain costs is to let one lapse and buy it back from whoever caught it.
2. Hosting
$0 to $50 a month for most business sites, and the range is that wide because the word covers three different things.
A static or server-rendered marketing site can genuinely run on a free or near-free tier. A site with a database, an admin panel and logged-in users needs a real server: budget $10–$30 a month. A store with traffic, background jobs and a search index is a different class again — that is where $50+ starts to be honest.
Beware the quote that says "hosting included". Included for how long, and at what renewal price? Bundled hosting is the most common way a low build price becomes an expensive decade.
3. TLS certificate
$0. This used to be a line item and it is not one any more. If someone is charging you annually for an SSL certificate on an ordinary business site, ask which certificate authority and why it is not Let's Encrypt. There are legitimate answers. There is usually not one.
4. Email
$0–$8 per mailbox per month. Your website and your email are separate services that happen to share a domain, and conflating them is how people end up unable to move host without losing five years of mail.
Budget for it properly, keep it at a provider you control, and set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on day one. Without those three records, the messages your contact form sends land in spam and you conclude the form is not working.
5. The CMS and its dependencies
$0 to several hundred a year, and this is the first place where the build decision shows up as a running cost.
A custom admin panel built for your content has no licence and no plugin bill. A page builder or a plugin stack has both — the builder subscription, the premium theme, the form plugin, the SEO plugin, the backup plugin, each renewing annually and each an update that can break the others.
We build corporate sites with a custom admin panel rather than a plugin install for exactly this reason. We make the fuller argument in the case against your page builder.
6. Monitoring and backups
$0–$15 a month. Uptime monitoring so you learn your site is down from a notification rather than from a customer. Backups so a bad deploy or a bad actor costs you an afternoon instead of the business.
Both are cheap, both are boring, and both are routinely skipped until the first incident.
7. Content and changes
This is the one. And it is almost never on anyone's list.
Every quarter you will want something: a new service page, a changed price, an updated team photo, a seasonal banner, a case study, a post. Either you do it, which costs your time, or someone does it for you, which costs money.
We price maintenance from $39 a month and content from $120. The numbers matter less than the fact that the line exists. Whatever you pay, pay it to someone — or accept that the site will be accurate on launch day and slowly stop being true.
The five-year total, worked properly
Here is the arithmetic for three shapes of site, at our entry prices, with running costs at the realistic middle of each range.
| Landing page | Corporate site | E-commerce store | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build (one-off) | $99 | $299 | $499 |
| Domain (5 yr) | $75 | $75 | $75 |
| Hosting (5 yr) | $300 | $900 | $1,800 |
| Email, 2 boxes (5 yr) | $360 | $360 | $360 |
| Monitoring + backups (5 yr) | $180 | $300 | $600 |
| Maintenance at $39/mo (5 yr) | $2,340 | $2,340 | $2,340 |
| Five-year total | $3,354 | $4,274 | $5,674 |
| Build as share of total | 3% | 7% | 9% |
Read the last row twice. On a five-year view the build is under a tenth of what the website costs you. Every argument about whether the build should be $99 or $299 is an argument about the smallest number on the page.
This is not a case for spending more on the build. It is a case for asking a different question. The right one is not "what does it cost to make" but "what does it cost to keep true, and who is doing that?"
The two costs that actually dominate
Strip out the utilities and two items are left holding the total.
Maintenance is the larger line, by a distance. At $39 a month it is $2,340 over five years — more than any build we sell. That is not a markup; it is what it costs to have someone reachable who knows your codebase. The alternative is not free, it is deferred: a site nobody has touched in three years is a migration project, not a website.
Changes you do not make are the invisible one. A price on your site that is eighteen months out of date is not a maintenance problem, it is a revenue problem, and it does not appear on any invoice. Neither does the service page you never wrote for the thing you now make most of your money from.
There is a third cost, and it is the biggest of all for the sites that get it wrong: the exit. A site you cannot move is a site you will pay for at whatever price is asked. Which brings us to the part of the running cost that is entirely a decision made at build time.
What makes the running cost go up
The five-year total is not fixed. Four build-time decisions move it hard.
Whose accounts is it in. If the domain, hosting and analytics are in your agency's account, every future change has a gatekeeper and the cost is whatever they say it is. Ours go in yours. We wrote a whole checklist for this in who owns your website.
How many licences it depends on. Each subscription is a renewal, a price rise and a breaking change waiting to happen. Count them before you sign, not after.
Whether anyone can read the code. A site only its author understands has exactly one possible supplier. That is a pricing position, and it is not yours.
How fast it is. Speed is not only a conversion issue, it is an infrastructure bill. A page that does ten times the database work needs ten times the server. See speed is a pricing decision.
We have been on the other side of all four. When we took on WClinic, the legacy site had no documented way to deploy it at all — so the first work was not features, it was restoring the environment, containerizing it and moving it to Git with CI. That is what deferred running cost looks like when the bill finally arrives: months of work before a single visible improvement.
What we do about it
Our position is on the pricing page and it is deliberately boring.
Support is included, for a stated period. Fourteen days on a landing page, 60 days on a corporate site, six months on a store, twelve months on a web app. Bugs, small content changes, technical help.
After that, maintenance is $39 a month — or nothing. You can take the code and go elsewhere. It is yours either way, with no licence to renew and no exit fee.
You own the accounts from day one. Source in your Git organization, your domain, your cloud, your analytics.
Let us be straight about the weak spot in that list: fourteen days is a short support period. It is short because a $99 landing page cannot carry six months of included support and still be $99. If you are buying at that price, plan for the maintenance line from the start, or plan to run it yourself. What we will not do is hide the trade-off in a footnote.
The five questions to ask any quote
Before you accept a website price — ours or anyone's — get these five answered in writing.
- What is the monthly running cost after handover, itemized? Not "minimal". A number, per line.
- Whose name is on the domain, the hosting and the analytics?
- How many paid licences or subscriptions does this site require to keep working?
- What happens in month thirteen if I want a change and you are unavailable?
- What is included in support, for how long, and what is the price after?
A supplier who answers all five plainly is telling you the real cost of the relationship. One who cannot is quoting you the build and leaving the rest to be discovered.
Tell us what you need. You get a fixed price and a delivery date back — free, and with no obligation to proceed.
Frequently asked questions
Is free hosting a trap?
Not inherently. A genuinely static marketing site runs fine on a free tier for years. The trap is free hosting for something that is not static — the moment you need a database, background jobs or a reliable response time, you are either paying or degrading, and the degradation arrives without warning on your busiest day.
Can I just not pay for maintenance?
Yes, and many businesses do. Be honest about what you are choosing: the site will keep serving the pages it has, and it will slowly diverge from the truth about your business. That is a defensible choice for a landing page with one message. It is a bad one for a store, where an out-of-date price is a dispute.
How much should I budget in year one, all in?
For a corporate site at our entry price, roughly $300 build plus $500–$700 of running cost if you take maintenance, or $200–$300 if you run it yourself. For a store, roughly $500 plus $900–$1,200. Those are honest middles, not floors.
Does a more expensive build reduce the running cost?
Sometimes, and it is the only good reason to spend more. Money spent on a custom admin panel instead of a plugin stack, on speed, and on code someone else can read genuinely lowers the five-year total. Money spent on visual ambition does not.
What is the single cheapest way to lower the total?
Own your accounts. It costs nothing at build time and it is the difference between a competitive market for your future work and a market of one.
