Learn · Pricing & costs
Both. There's a one-time build cost and a smaller ongoing cost to keep the site live and healthy: hosting, domain renewal, maintenance, security updates, and content changes. Treating a website as a launch-and-forget purchase is the most common budgeting mistake.
The ongoing side is modest but real. A simple site needs hosting and one domain renewal a year, both small. Maintenance depends on how much the site changes, and on whether you handle it in-house or pay someone for support.
Think of a website like a vehicle, not a poster. The purchase is the start. Keeping it running well (updates, fixes, improvements) is what protects the value of that initial investment over the years it's in use.
Updated August 2026
Go deeper
Related
Beyond the build fee, budget for hosting, a domain renewal, SSL (usually free now), premium plugins or licenses, professional content and photography, ongoing maintenance and security updates, and future changes. These are easy to forget at quote time and add up across the first year.
Maintenance covers updates, security patches, backups, small content changes, and fixes. For a simple site it can be a few hundred dollars a year or handled in-house. For a larger or business-critical site, a support plan commonly runs a percentage of the build cost annually, since more moving parts need more attention.
Hosting comes in three broad tiers. Shared hosting is the cheapest and suits most small sites. A VPS or managed cloud plan costs more and suits busier ones. Modern platforms like Vercel and Netlify sit alongside both, with a free tier that covers a lot of small projects outright.