Full transparency

Your $99 website
doesn't cost $99

A website isn't a purchase. It's a subscription you didn't know you signed up for. Here are all the numbers — including the ones nobody mentions when they hand you a quote.

1
domain that renews every year, whether you remember or not
12
months of hosting somebody has to pay for
0
warnings you get before something breaks
01

The bill nobody shows you

You get quoted for a website. You pay. The website exists. End of story. Except it isn't: that website needs five things to stay alive next year, and four of them get charged to a card.

This isn't a knock on the model. It's just the reality of having something connected to the internet 24/7. A car doesn't stop costing money when you drive it off the lot, and a website doesn't either. The difference is that your car gets an inspection reminder; your website tells you it's down when a customer says "your page isn't loading".

The simple rule: building a site is a one-time payment. Owning it is a yearly expense that rarely drops below USD 100, no matter how simple the project is.
02

The breakdown, no fine print

These are the real annual costs of a small website, with 2026 pricing:

Item USD / year
Domain (.com or .cl) 10 – 30
Decent shared hosting 60 – 150
SSL certificate 0 (Let's Encrypt)
Business email (1 user) 0 – 84
Off-site backup 0 – 60
Technical maintenance (2 h/year) 80 – 200
Realistic total 150 – 524

Yes: a $99 website can cost you $150 to $524 a year just to keep it alive. Nobody is scamming you. There are simply five services running underneath, and they all bill you.

Watch out for SSL specifically: it's free, but somebody has to renew it. When a certificate expires, Chrome shows visitors a red screen saying "Your connection is not private". I've seen businesses lose a full weekend of sales over that.

03

The cost that never shows up on an invoice

Hosting is never the expensive part. The expensive part is the day something breaks and nobody knows why.

Here's a first-hand example: not long ago this very site went down. The cause wasn't an attack or an elegant bug — the server disk was full. A few old videos nobody used were taking up 72 MB, and the system couldn't write a single one-kilobyte file anymore. Forms stopped working silently.

Finding it took time: reading logs, testing uploads of different sizes, measuring folders, discovering that locked files don't even show up in the FTP listing. Nobody pays for that hour, because technically "it wasn't development".

And that's the point: the real cost of a website isn't the sum of the invoices. It's the invoices plus the hours of someone who knows what to do when something stops working. If there's nobody, that someone is you. And you probably have a business to run.

The math that actually hurts: if your site is down for a weekend and you get 10 enquiries a month, that weekend can cost more than three years of hosting.
04

Three scenarios, three bills

Landing page or brochure site

One to five pages, contact form, no database. Shared hosting and nothing else. USD 150 – 300 a year. If you go with cheap hosting you'll save USD 40 and lose three weekends of your life.

Online store

Payment gateway fees (per transaction), better hosting, backups of every order, and someone watching that payments keep flowing. USD 400 – 1,000 a year, not counting transaction fees. And don't skimp on backups: losing a month of order data has no price tag but plenty of consequences.

Custom system (ERP, bookings, management)

Dedicated server or VPS, database, monitoring, dependency updates with security patches and someone on call. USD 700 – 2,500 a year. This is where "we'll deal with it later" costs the most: these systems hold customer data, and a breach doesn't get fixed with an apology email.

Rule of thumb: if your site generates less than it costs to maintain, the problem isn't hosting — it's that the site isn't doing its job. Invest in content and SEO, not in cutting the $20 backup.
05

How to lower the bill without breaking anything

Not everything is about paying more. Some choices genuinely save money; others just move the expense forward.

Actually saves money: Let's Encrypt SSL, compressed images (this site cut its image folder by 90%, which is why the disk stopped filling up), cancelling services you don't use, and picking hosting based on real traffic instead of fear.
Doesn't save money: skipping backups, leaving the site unpatched, using free hosting email that lands your messages in spam, or buying "unlimited hosting" for $2 a month and discovering the limit when you need it.

And one almost nobody considers: put the domain in your own name. If the domain is registered under your agency or "the friend who built it", you don't own your own address on the internet. When that person disappears, the site goes with them.

06

So why am I telling you this?

Because it's easier to sell you a website and vanish than to explain what comes after.

I could write another article full of buzzwords and a call to action at the end. But if you're reading this, something probably already happened: you paid for a site, a year went by, and something stopped working. Or you're about to hire someone and want to know what you're getting into.

Either way, the honest answer is the same: the website is the cheap part. Keeping it running is the expensive part. And anyone charging you for a web project should be able to explain, without dodging, what happens on day 366.

Want to know what your project would cost per year?

I'll hand you the full breakdown — hosting, domain, email, backups and maintenance — before you sign anything. No surprises on day 366.

Yearly cost in writing
No hidden fees
Domain in your name
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