Website subscription or one-off build: how the costs compare over five years

A website subscription spreads the cost of a site across monthly payments, and a one-off build charges most of it upfront. Which is cheaper depends on how long you keep the site and what you need done to it afterwards. On our base plan of $298 a month, you pay $3,576 over the first year and $10,728 over three. Our cost of a website guide puts an agency's one-off price for a small business site at $6,000 to $18,000, with hosting and maintenance on top. So the plan costs less in the first two years, the two get closer by year five, and the real difference is what happens after launch.

The arithmetic

All figures are in Australian dollars and include GST.

The one-off column is incomplete on purpose. A build price usually covers design and build and some content. Hosting, security updates, backups, small changes and monitoring are charged separately or not done. We covered the line items in what a website maintenance plan should cover. Once you add a reasonable figure for those, the one-off column rises each year while the subscription column stays level. The honest picture is a pair of lines that start far apart and converge. Where they cross depends on your site and on what you pay for hosting and upkeep, and we would not put a single year on it.

A one-off build can win on cost if the site is small, you are happy to change nothing, and someone you trust looks after the hosting. We do not pretend otherwise.

What the subscription includes and leaves out

The base plan covers the site, hosting, upkeep, small edits and a monthly report. It does not include search engine optimisation or Google Ads management. Those are add-ons, each $549 a month, month to month, so you can start and stop them without a payout:

• the SEO add-on, for ongoing work on how the site appears in search,
• the Ads management add-on, for managing your Google Ads account.

For Ads, you create and own the Google Ads account and pay Google directly for what you spend on clicks. We charge only for managing it.

The catch in a 12 month term

The base plan has a 12 month minimum. We would rather say plainly how that sits with the idea of being in it together, because it can read as the opposite. We build the site without a large upfront fee, which means we carry the build cost and recover it through the monthly payments. The term is what makes that workable. If you leave inside it, you pay the remaining months at the monthly rate, which for the base plan means the number of months left times $298.

That is a real commitment on your side, and you should weigh it. If you are unsure whether you will still want the site in a year, a one-off build or a shorter arrangement may suit you better. After the first 12 months the plan continues month to month.

Where the alignment comes from

Most agencies charge for the build and are finished when it launches. We are paid every month the arrangement continues, so we only keep earning if the site stays working for you. That is an incentive, not a guarantee of results. We do not promise rankings, enquiries or revenue, and nobody honest can.

What the monthly model changes is who looks after things when something goes wrong. In recent weeks we have written up three problems that nobody would have seen on launch day:

• a form that told visitors it had sent while the enquiry went nowhere (contact forms that fail silently),
• a security update that returned errors on every page of our own site (why we release in stages),
• sitemap dates that stopped Google recrawling edited posts (the sitemap date that gave it away).

Each of those was found after launch. Under a fixed price, finding them is somebody's separate job or nobody's.

Does a website pay for itself?

Work out your own version of this sum:

1. What is an average job or sale worth to your business, before costs?
2. How many extra jobs a month would cover $298?

If an average job is worth a few hundred dollars or more, one extra job a month covers the base fee. Whether the site actually brings that job is the real question, and it depends on your trade, your area and your competition. If you want to check it for yourself, we have written about counting the enquiries you already get. Treat the sum as a way to decide whether the fee is reasonable for your business, not as a forecast.

How to choose

A subscription suits you if you want no large upfront cost, you want someone responsible for the site afterwards, and you expect to keep it for at least a year. A one-off build suits you if you have a specific bespoke need, a budget for it, and a person or team to look after the site.

Our pricing page lists the plans, and the web design service page covers what we build. When you are ready to talk, start a project.