Everyone compares build prices. Almost nobody compares the three year total, which is the number that decides whether the build was a good buy.
Here is what actually lands on the invoice after launch.
Hosting
£15 to £60 a month for a normal business site. Anyone charging you £200 a month for hosting a brochure site is charging you for something else and calling it hosting.
If the site does real work, has a database doing something and traffic worth having, £50 to £150 a month is reasonable. Above that you should be able to point at a specific reason.
The thing to check is whose name the account is in. If your agency holds it, that is not hosting, it is a hostage arrangement, and you will find out when you try to leave.
Maintenance
This is where the range is enormous and where the cheap build gets expensive.
On a template or plugin platform, budget £50 to £200 a month, and expect it to be genuinely necessary. Plugins update, updates break things, and something needs patching most months. Skip it for a year and you get a security problem or a broken checkout at a bad moment.
On a custom build, budget 15 to 20% of the build cost annually. On a £15,000 site that is £2,250 to £3,000 a year. There is less to break, because there are no third party plugins fighting each other, but the framework still needs keeping current.
Those numbers look similar. The difference is what you get for them. On the first, most of the money is spent stopping things breaking. On the second, most of it is spent on changes you asked for.
Licences
The quiet one. Page builders, form handlers, booking tools, search, whichever plugin does the one thing your site actually needed.
£200 to £2,000 a year is typical, and it rises. A lot of it is priced per user or per seat, so it grows every time you hire. Three years in, businesses are often paying more annually in licences than they spent on maintenance, and nobody has ever sat down and added it up.
Worth doing. Go and add it up.
Content and changes
Whatever the site cost, you will want to change it. New pages, new products, seasonal campaigns, a service you no longer offer.
If your team can do it, this is free. If every change needs a developer, it is £500 to £2,000 a year in small invoices, and worse, it is the reason sites go stale. People stop asking because asking is a hassle.
This is the whole argument for a CMS your team will actually use, and it is why we spend as long on the admin as the public side. A site your marketing person can edit gets edited. One they have to request changes to slowly stops reflecting the business.
The rebuild
The cost nobody puts in the comparison.
A template site typically needs replacing in three to four years. Not because it broke, but because the platform moved on, the plugins are abandoned, and changing anything meaningful is harder than starting again.
A custom build should last five to eight, because it is a codebase rather than an assembly of other people's decisions, and it can be extended.
Spread that cost over the years it lasts. A £4,000 site rebuilt every three years is £1,333 a year in build cost alone. A £15,000 site rebuilt every six is £2,500. Closer than the sticker price suggests, and the second one did more for six years.
Three years, added up
A cheap template build:
- £4,000 up front
- £100 a month maintenance
- £600 a year in licences
- £800 a year in changes you cannot make yourself
- a rebuild due at the end of it
Roughly £12,000, and you are back where you started.
A custom build:
- £15,000 up front
- £60 a month hosting and support
- no licences
- changes made by your own team
- still current at year three, and good for a few more
Roughly £17,000, and you still own something.
Those are illustrative and your numbers will differ. The point is that the gap between £4,000 and £15,000 is not £11,000. It is about £5,000 spread over three years, and one of them leaves you with an asset.
When cheap is right
If your site is genuinely a business card, the phone is how people contact you, and nothing on it changes, buy the cheap one. Do not let anyone talk you into £15,000 for something that needs to exist rather than perform. We tell people this regularly and we mean it.
The arithmetic above only matters when the site has a job. If it does, ask any agency quoting you for their three year number, not their build price. The ones who have thought about it will have an answer.
