What Your Website Costs Every Year After Launch

The price you agree with a designer is not the whole bill. Every website has a running cost, and most owners only meet theirs a year later, when a renewal lands that nobody mentioned.

Here is what a small business website actually costs to keep, and the questions that stop the surprises.

The five bills that come back every year

• The domain. $12 to $25 a year for a .com. This is the address customers type, and it should be registered in your own name, in your own account. It is the one thing that is genuinely yours.
• Hosting. $0 to $360 a year. Cheap shared hosting is fine for a brochure site. What you are really buying is the site being up, being secure, and being backed up.
• Email. $0 if you use a free mailbox, $6 to $12 per person per month if you want it on your own domain. Most owners who look small-business-serious want the second one.
• An editor or page builder. $0 to $300 a year. Some builders charge a monthly fee just to let you change your own text, which is worth knowing before you build a business on one.
• The extras. Forms, booking, backups, a plugin or two. $0 to $240 a year depending on what the site does.

Add it up and a simple site runs $100 to $400 a year. One that takes bookings or payments runs $400 to $900.

Where owners get caught out

• The intro price. Hosting at $2.99 a month for year one, $14.99 from year two. Ask what the price is in month thirteen, not month one.
• Per-site plugins. A licence that covers one site is fine until you need a second.
• The retainer for small edits. If changing your hours costs an hour of somebody's time, that is a yearly bill pretending to be a favour.
• The free plan that ends. Free builders are real, and so are the limits that arrive with them.

What we do, so you can compare

Hosting, the security certificate, backups and looking after the site after launch are inside the price you pay for the build. There is no maintenance plan to buy and no yearly invoice from us. In year two, if something breaks, you email us and we fix it. The only bills you keep paying are the domain and your email, which stay in your name.

Four ways to keep the yearly cost down

1. Register the domain yourself, in your own account, and keep the login somewhere you will find it.
2. Ask for the year-two price of every subscription before you commit to it.
3. Keep the number of paid tools to the ones you actually open.
4. Take a copy of your content once a year. Words and photos should never be trapped inside a tool.

The build is a one-time cost. The yearly cost is a decision you get to make, as long as somebody tells you what it is.

If you would rather have the yearly number settled before you start, see what our builds include — hosting, backups and after-launch care are in the price.