One-off and fee: two lines, not a single price
A managed website has two cost lines, and it’s the first thing to get clear to understand what you’re actually paying for. There’s the initial build, which you pay once, and there’s the monthly fee that keeps the site online, secure and updated over time. Anyone giving you a single round number, without splitting them, is telling you half the story.
The build is the work of designing, writing and standing up the site: structure, design, content, features. The fee is the work that continues after launch: hosting, domain, updates, security and the changes you need. Splitting them lets you see where every euro goes, and lets you compare two quotes on the same terms instead of pitting one flat figure against another.
What’s in the monthly fee
The fee for a managed website covers a few precise lines, it isn’t a generic figure. First, hosting and domain: the space where the site lives and the address you reach it at, with security certificates always valid and no last-minute renewal email to answer in a rush. Then updates, technical and content, because a frozen site ages fast.
There’s security, meaning the checks, backups and patches that keep the site protected from attacks and failures before they become a problem. And there are changes: a price that changes, a new page, a seasonal promotion. With a managed site you write to us and we do it, usually the same day, without opening a new quote each time. That’s the difference from a site built once and then abandoned.
What pushes the build up or down
The price of the build depends mostly on three things: how many pages you need, how much content has to be prepared and which features the site must have. A few-page showcase site, made to get you found and contacted, sits in the lower range. As you add custom features the work grows, and so does the price.
The features that weigh most are the ones that handle data or transactions: a booking system, a private area for clients, an e-commerce with catalogue and payments. If you need to sell online the logic is the same but the project is bigger: we cover it on the managed websites page and, for the store side, in the e-commerce solutions.
Why speed weighs on cost and on results
A slow site isn’t just annoying: it costs. Google uses speed as a ranking factor, AI assistants struggle to read heavy pages, and above all visitors leave before they even read. A page that loads fast keeps more people, and keeping people is half the job of a website.
Speed doesn’t happen by itself: it’s the result of technical choices made well and kept up over time. A custom-built, cared-for site stays fast; a bought theme filled with plugins slows down month after month, until something breaks. That’s why the managed part isn’t an accessory cost but part of the value: it’s what keeps the site fast when it matters, which is always.
Managed site or DIY platform
The temptation, to keep the spend down, is to use a drag-and-drop platform and build the site yourself. For a very small project it can be enough. But the real cost of those platforms isn’t the monthly fee on the label: it’s the time you spend on it, the limits you discover along the way, and the performance that rarely stands up to a well-built site.
A managed site moves that work onto us. You learn no panel, chase no updates, and don’t wake up with the site offline on promo day. You pay a clear fee and have a technician who answers. For a business that expects clients from the site, that’s the difference between a tool that works and a project that stalls halfway.
When a managed site is worth it
A managed site is worth it when the site is a channel that brings clients, not a static business card. Local businesses that want to be found on Google and Maps, anyone with an old site no one updates, anyone who doesn’t want to manage hosting and security on their own: these are the cases where the managed part pays for itself.
It isn’t worth it, honestly, if you need a page you’ll never touch again and expect nothing from. In that case we tell you. But if the site has to work for you, keeping it alive, fast and secure isn’t an extra to cut: it’s the reason it works instead of sitting there as a dead cost.
Three mistakes when comparing quotes
The first mistake is looking only at the build figure and ignoring the fee. A site that costs little up front but leaves you alone with hosting and updates on your shoulders costs more in the long run, in time and in problems. The second is confusing a bought theme with a built site: they look the same on day one, they aren’t at the first big update.
The third mistake is getting a final price promised before anyone has understood what you need. A serious quote comes after a conversation about your case, not before. If someone throws a figure at you on the phone in thirty seconds, they’re guessing, and sooner or later you pay the difference.
What the fee doesn’t cover
To be completely clear, it’s worth saying what a managed website’s fee doesn’t cover too. It doesn’t cover big rewrites: if after two years you want to rethink the site from scratch, with a new structure and sections that weren’t there before, that’s a new project, not a change. Small and medium changes yes, a full rebuild no, and it’s right that the two stay distinct.
It also doesn’t cover third-party costs that depend on you: an external booking service, font or photo licences, advertising campaigns, email marketing tools. When they’re needed we point them out with their real cost, separate from the fee, so you always know what you pay us and what you pay others. An honest quote separates the two instead of hiding them in a single line.
How we give you the price
We don’t throw out a figure and we don’t have a fake price list. We start with a call, understand what you need, how many pages and which features, and give you a clear quote before we begin. What you see in the quote is what you pay, even once the job is done.
If you want to understand in detail what drives the cost and how we work on the managed part, the managed websites page explains it step by step. And if your project is more a piece of software than a website, the reasoning changes: there it’s about custom software.
Questions
- Is the fee mandatory?
- The fee keeps the site online, secure and updated. Without it, the site sits still and ages: it’s the “managed” part, which we handle.
- Can I move a site I already have to a managed one?
- Yes. We often rebuild or improve the existing site and then take it into management ourselves. You’ll find how it works on the managed websites page.