What a company website costs over three years

The invoice for the build says $12,000, and the finance team files it under one-time capital spend, the way you'd file a new sign for the office. Eighteen months later someone asks why "website" keeps showing up as a recurring line, and the honest answer is that it never stopped being one. Hosting renewed. The platform's pricing tier crept up. Someone spent four hours a month writing the blog post nobody assigned a budget to. None of that was hidden on purpose — the build quote was an accurate answer to the question it was asked, which was "what does building this cost." Nobody asked what it costs to keep.

That's the fair version of events, and it's worth stating plainly before the rest of this, because the alternative — assuming someone padded a number or buried a fee — is usually wrong. A design-and-build quote prices design and build. What a company website is actually for is a separate question again, and what it costs to keep it that way is a third one — almost nobody prices that third question until they're already living inside the answer.

The line items that never make it into the same document as the build

A build quote typically covers design, development and a launch date. Everything below that line is real spend that lands on someone's desk later, one bill at a time rather than one invoice.

Content is the first one, and it doesn't end at launch — a site written once and never touched again is a site that stops ranking, stops reflecting what the company actually sells, and starts looking abandoned to anyone who checks the blog date. Photography is separate from content and usually gets skipped first, replaced with stock, which is fine for a page that isn't selling trust directly and a real gap for one that is. Hosting is a monthly or annual charge that exists whether or not anyone remembers it exists. The domain is a small annual renewal that is easy to forget until the year it lapses and the whole site goes dark over a clerical error. Platform fees are the subscription a builder or CMS charges to stay live, and they are the line most likely to move without warning. Maintenance covers plugin and core updates, broken-link checks and the small fixes that accumulate on any site that's been live more than a year. Security is maintenance's more urgent sibling — patches applied on a schedule rather than after something goes wrong. And internal hours — the time an employee spends writing, reviewing, approving and chasing — is the largest of all of these on almost every site, and the one with no invoice attached to it at all.

If the company is one person, most of this model doesn't apply

Worth saying early, because it changes the whole shape of the budget: everything above assumes a company site with more than one page and more than one stakeholder. A large share of the sites that get budgeted this way don't actually need to be. A consultant, a freelance designer, an independent advisor — a business that is genuinely one person — is usually better served by the one-page site a solo consultant needs than by anything resembling the scenarios below, because most of the line items above (a CMS, ongoing content strategy, a photography budget, several stakeholders' review hours) exist to support a page count this business will never reach.

For that narrower case, reach is the strongest answer available, and worth naming directly rather than saving for a footnote. It turns a CV into a finished one-page site: you upload a résumé and a photo, answer a short form, pick a look, and the page is generated in about twenty seconds — live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes. Premium, which unlocks a custom domain, is $4.99 a month or $49 a year. The honest limitation matters here specifically, because this article is otherwise about multi-page sites: reach makes exactly one page. There's no second page, no navigation, no CMS to grow into. For the sole-trader case that's rarely a problem — there was never going to be a second page — but it means reach has no place in the scenarios that follow, which are for companies that genuinely need more than one.

On price alone, for the specific job of one page on your own domain:

Tool	Price	Billing
reach	$4.99/mo or $49/year	Premium, custom domain
Carrd Pro Standard	$19/year	annual only, custom domain from this tier
Framer Basic	$10/mo	billed annually, custom domain included

Prices checked August 2026.

The cost of a platform whose price moves under you

The clearest way to lose control of a three-year budget is to sign up for a number that isn't the real number. WordPress hosting is the sharpest example of this because the mechanic is published outright rather than buried: IONOS Grow advertises $1 a month for the first year, which is $12 for year one — and then renews at $12 a month, or $144 a year, for every year after. Across three years that's $12 plus $144 plus $144, or $300, against an advertised headline of "$1 a month" that only ever described the first twelve of thirty-six months. Hostinger, SiteGround and Bluehost all carry versions of the same trap at different multiples; Kinsta is the one WordPress-adjacent host on record without an intro-versus-renewal gap at all.

Wix and Squarespace run a quieter version of the same problem. Wix's free domain is only free if you pay annually — "Monthly plans do not include Wix vouchers" — so choosing the monthly plan to keep cash flow smooth costs you the domain you thought was included. Squarespace has no free tier at all; the entry point is a 14-day trial, and content left past expiry is "marked for permanent deletion." Webflow's version is structural rather than a trap exactly: site plan, workspace plan, seats and add-ons bill on four separate axes at once, and the cheapest paid site plan, Basic at $15 a month billed annually, doesn't include the CMS — that starts at Premium. Prices checked August 2026.

The lesson isn't "avoid these platforms." It's that the number on the pricing page and the number on the year-two invoice are frequently different numbers, and a three-year budget built on the first one is wrong before the site even launches.

Content refresh isn't a project. It's a subscription you pay in hours

Every version of this budget conversation treats content as something that happens once, during the build, and that assumption is the single biggest reason three-year totals surprise people. A page written for launch describes the company as it was on launch day. Eighteen months later the pricing has changed, a product line has been added, a case study is out of date, and the page either gets updated or it quietly starts lying by omission. Neither the update nor the decision not to do it is free — the second one just doesn't show up as a cost anywhere, it shows up as a site that looks stale to anyone checking twice.

Model it honestly and the number stops looking optional. Twenty pages needing a light refresh pass — not a rewrite, just keeping facts current — at even a modest few hours a month adds up to real annual hours, on top of whatever net-new content a growing business needs written from scratch. That work has to be done by someone, and the someone is very rarely a line item in the original build quote. It's usually the same person who wrote it the first time, doing it again in the margins of a job that isn't "write the website."

Three worked totals

None of what follows is a quote. It's the arithmetic of adding the missing line items — content, photography, hosting, domain, platform fees, maintenance, security and internal hours — to a plausible build price at three sizes, over 36 months.

Small business site, five to eight pages, freelance-built, self-hosted WordPress on budget hosting. Build: $3,000. Content, initial plus three years of refresh: $2,400. Photography (stock library, one-time): $150. Hosting (IONOS Grow pattern, year one at the intro rate, years two and three at the renewal rate): $300. Domain, included free in year one then renewed: $36. Maintenance and security (a monitoring and update service): $540. Internal hours — the owner managing the freelancer, reviewing drafts, making small edits, roughly three hours a month over three years: $5,400. Total: $11,826 — about 3.9 times the build price.

Mid-sized company site, roughly 20 pages, small agency build, on a hosted platform with a content plan. Build: $12,000. Content, initial plus refresh: $7,600. Photography (one commissioned shoot): $1,500. Platform, billed annually: $1,044 over three years. Domain, included year one then renewed: $40. Maintenance and security (a small monthly agency retainer): $3,600. Internal hours, roughly five hours a month across marketing reviewing copy and approving changes: $10,800. Total: $36,584 — about 3.1 times the build price.

Larger company site, 40-plus pages with a CMS, full agency build. Build: $35,000. Content, initial plus refresh: $19,000. Photography (multiple shoots over three years): $4,000. Platform, site plan plus workspace plan billed annually: $1,584 over three years. Domain: $60. Maintenance and security (a standing agency retainer): $18,000. Internal hours, roughly ten hours a month across marketing, sales and an approver: $25,200. Total: $102,844 — about 2.9 times the build price.

The multiple shrinks as the site gets bigger, and that's worth noticing rather than treating as noise: the smallest budget carries the largest proportional hit because internal hours and maintenance don't scale down the way a build quote does. A freelancer costs less to hire than an agency, but reviewing drafts and updating a hero section takes the same owner-hours either way.

What gets cut first, and what never should

When the real number lands on a desk that budgeted the build-only figure, the same three things get cut, in the same order, almost every time. Photography goes first — stock is free-ish and nobody notices the difference in a board meeting the way they'd notice a missing page. Content refresh goes second, because a stale page doesn't break anything visibly; it just slowly stops being true, and that's a cost that's easy to defer because it never arrives as a single bill. And the CMS or platform tier gets downgraded third, trading editorial flexibility for a cheaper renewal, usually right around the point in what a redesign actually costs where the next rebuild is being justified partly by a content model that got starved of the refresh budget that would have kept it current.

Security is the one line that should never move, and it's usually the first one considered, because it's invisible until it isn't. A site that stops receiving core and plugin updates doesn't announce that it's exposed — it just sits there, working normally, until the year it doesn't. The saving from skipping a maintenance retainer is small and monthly. The cost of not having skipped it never shows up as a line item either; it shows up as an incident.

The honest way to run this budget is the same one that applies to the build quote itself: name the real number before the project starts, not after the first year of invoices makes it obvious. A three-year total that's two to four times the build price isn't a failure of planning. Not knowing that going in is.