Website Maintenance Cost: What You Really Pay After Launch, Per Month and Per Year

When a company budgets for a website, it budgets for the build. The cost of the next five years gets a line that says "hosting" and a number someone guessed. Then the invoices start: plugin renewals, a developer to fix the contact form after an update, a "maintenance retainer" nobody can quite explain.

This post lists what a company website really costs to run after launch, why the platform matters so much, and what a care plan should actually cover.

The four costs of running a website

1. Infrastructure

• Domain: a small yearly fee per domain.
• Hosting: from free or low-cost plans for many company sites on modern platforms such as Vercel, up to substantial monthly fees for heavy traffic or complex applications.
• Email: usually already paid for through your mailbox provider.

For most B2B company sites, infrastructure is the smallest part of the bill.

2. Licences and paid services

• a CMS plan, if the content model or team size needs a paid tier;
• licensed fonts;
• premium plugins and themes on WordPress, often renewed yearly;
• usage-based services: form handling, WhatsApp messages through Meta, AI APIs, maps.

These add up quietly. List them all in one place once a year and cancel what you no longer use.

3. Technical upkeep

Updates to the platform and its dependencies, security fixes, backups and monitoring. This is where platforms differ most, and where most of the hidden cost lives.

4. Changes

New pages, updated text and images, a new case study, a landing page for a campaign. Some of this your team can do in the CMS; some needs a developer.

Why the platform matters so much

On a typical WordPress site, technical upkeep is a monthly job. Core, theme and every plugin get updates, any of which can conflict with another, so someone should test them before they go live. Skip it and you risk security holes; do it carelessly and you risk a broken site. Premium plugins add renewal fees. I've done the maths on this in the hidden cost of WordPress over five years: as an illustration, two to four developer hours a month at €75 an hour is about €1,800 to €3,600 a year, before licences. Use your own hours and rate.

A custom site prebuilt on a modern stack such as Next.js has no plugin layer and no public admin login for bots to target. Pages are served as files from a global network. Dependencies still need occasional updates, but there's far less to patch and much less that can break between visits. That's a large part of why a WordPress to Next.js migration often pays for itself over a few years.

Site builders like Wix or Squarespace sit in between: upkeep is included in the subscription, and you pay for it every month whether you change anything or not.

What a care plan should cover

"Maintenance" is a word that can mean anything, which is why so many retainers feel like paying for nothing. A care plan worth having lists, in writing:

• What's included: updates, monitoring, backups, small content changes, fixes.
• How much: hours or number of requests per month, and what happens to unused time.
• How fast: response times for urgent problems versus normal requests.
• What's not included: new features and new page types, quoted separately.
• Who does the work: the person who built the site, or whoever is free.

If a plan can't answer those five questions, it isn't a plan; it's a subscription.

When you don't need one

If your team edits content in the CMS, the site is built on a stable stack, and you rarely need new page types, you may not need a monthly plan at all. Pay for changes when you need them, as small fixed-price jobs.

A plan makes sense when you change the site often, run campaigns that need new landing pages, or want one person accountable for keeping the site fast, secure and current.

A simple way to budget your year

Make a table with one row per cost and fill it in with your own numbers. It takes ten minutes and usually surprises someone.

Cost	How often	Who you pay
Domain(s)	Yearly	Registrar
Hosting	Monthly or yearly	Hosting provider
Email	Monthly	Mailbox provider
CMS plan	Monthly, if any	CMS provider
Fonts and licences	Yearly or one-off	Foundries, plugin makers
Usage-based services	Monthly, varies	Meta, AI APIs, form or map services
Technical upkeep	Monthly on plugin sites	Developer or care plan
Changes	When needed	Your team, developer or care plan

Two lines deserve attention. Technical upkeep is near zero on some platforms and a monthly line on others; if it's a big number, the platform is the reason. Changes depend on how often your business changes what it sells and says. A company that adds a case study a month and a landing page a quarter has a different budget from one that touches the site twice a year.

Questions to ask before you sign a maintenance agreement

• What exactly happens each month, and will I see a report of it?
• If something breaks on a Friday evening, how quickly will someone look at it?
• Are content changes included, and how many?
• Who owns the hosting and the code if we stop the plan?
• Can we pause or cancel, and with what notice?

The last two matter most. Maintenance should be something you choose every month, not something you can't leave.

How I handle it

Every Unlockd project includes post-launch support, and anything that doesn't work as agreed is fixed at no extra cost. After that, care plans for updates and changes start from €150 a month, and they're optional: you own the code, domain and accounts, and your team edits content in the CMS. Larger additions are quoted as their own fixed-price project. I list the expected running costs, by provider, in every website proposal, so nobody has to guess the number in year two.

If you're already paying for maintenance and can't tell what you get for it, the paid audit will tell you what your site actually needs, and what it doesn't.