The short answer
For most small businesses, a website costs somewhere between $50 and $500 a month once everything is counted. The low end keeps a simple site online and patched. The high end pays for a site that keeps improving: new pages, search work and someone who answers when something breaks.
What moves the number is not the size of the site. It is what you expect to happen to it after launch. A brochure site nobody touches is cheap to keep. A site that is supposed to bring in calls and bookings needs ongoing work, and that work is where the money goes.
What you are actually paying for
Every website, however it is built, has the same running costs. These are typical ranges, not quotes:
- Domain name: about $10 to $25 a year, so a dollar or two a month.
- Hosting: from a few dollars a month for basic shared hosting to $30 to $100 or more for managed hosting with backups, a CDN and someone watching uptime.
- Updates and security: free if you do it yourself and have the time, or roughly $50 to $250 a month for a care plan that does it for you.
- Licenses: paid themes, plugins and apps often add $10 to $50 a month, and more for online stores.
- SEO: a few hundred dollars a month for basic local SEO, and well over $1,000 for full agency campaigns.
- Changes and support: if they are not part of a plan, usually billed by the hour, commonly $75 to $150.
Add those up and it is easy to see why two businesses with similar-looking sites pay very different amounts. One pays for hosting only. The other pays for hosting, a care plan, two app subscriptions and a few hours of fixes every quarter.
The cost people forget: the build
Monthly costs are only half of it. A traditional custom website starts with a build invoice, commonly a few thousand dollars and often $10,000 or more for a custom design with several page types. That money is spent before the site earns anything.
Spread over the three or four years most sites stay in service, a $6,000 build is roughly $125 to $165 a month on top of everything above. It just does not show up on a monthly bill, so it is easy to leave out when comparing options.
Three ways to pay for a website
- Do it yourself on a site builder. A plan on a builder like Squarespace or Wix is usually $20 to $50 a month. It is the cheapest option in dollars, and the most expensive in your own time. Design, updates, SEO and fixes are all on you.
- A custom build, then separate vendors. You pay a designer upfront, then pay a host, maybe a maintenance plan, maybe an SEO freelancer. You get a custom site, but you manage several bills and several people, and nobody owns the whole result.
- A website subscription. One team designs, builds, hosts, maintains and improves the site for a flat monthly fee, with little or nothing upfront. You trade a one-time invoice for a predictable bill, and the site keeps getting attention after launch. How a website subscription works.
Which one fits your business
- You rarely change the site, you are comfortable with the tools and your time is cheap: a site builder is fine.
- You have the budget upfront, you need something unusual, and you have reliable people for hosting and fixes: a custom build can work.
- You want a custom site that brings in work, without managing vendors or paying a large invoice first: a subscription usually costs about the same over three years and gets you more ongoing help.
A good test: list every website-related charge on your card statement for the last year, plus anything you paid someone to fix. That is your real monthly cost, and the number to compare against.
What Bunched charges
Bunched is a website subscription. The first month's plan price covers the build, then it is the same amount every month, with no contract.
- Starter, $149 a month: custom design, managed hosting with SSL, CDN and daily backups, monthly CMS and security updates, uptime monitoring and email support.
- Growth, $349 a month: everything in Starter plus a support hour each month, a monthly SEO health report, on-page SEO updates and content edits.
- Premium, $699 a month: everything in Growth plus three support hours, full on-page SEO management, unlimited content edits and a quarterly strategy call.
Paying annually saves 15%. Compare the details on the plans page.