What a website costs after launch

A quote for a website describes the part of the work that ends. Design, build, launch, invoice. What it usually leaves out is everything that starts the day after, and in our experience that is where most of what a site costs actually sits, whether or not anyone budgeted for it.

Some of that cost is easy to see once you look for it. The domain renews. The hosting renews. The paid plugins the site depends on usually renew too, sometimes on a card that belongs to the person who built it. Ask who owns each of those accounts before the build starts. The answer is often a person rather than the organization, and it matters the day that person stops answering email.

The bigger cost is the work that keeps a site from breaking. Your site gets updates on a schedule, and so does every plugin on it. Most of them change nothing you can see. Occasionally one changes the form your intake runs through, and nobody notices until someone asks why the submissions stopped two months ago. Skipping updates to avoid that is worse: a site that has not been patched in a year is the one that ends up hosting something it should not, and the cleanup costs more than the maintenance would have.

Backups belong in the same category, with one qualifier we have learned to ask about. A backup that has never been restored is a hope. Most hosts will tell you they take one nightly; fewer can tell you the last time anyone pulled a site back out of it and checked that the forms still worked. It is a question we make ourselves answer about the sites we host, because the first time you find out a backup is unusable should not be the day you need it.

Then there is the drift nobody plans for. A site that passed an accessibility check at launch stops passing the first time someone adds a page in a hurry: an image with no description, or a PDF uploaded where a page should be. None of that is a build failure. It is ordinary use, and it is the reason a one-time audit says less than it seems to, something we wrote about earlier. For a grant-funded organization or a public agency, the obligation is to the site as it is today, and it does not care when the audit happened.

The last cost lands on your staff. Every routine change has a price in someone's afternoon: the hours that changed, the event that moved. If the only person who can make that change bills by the hour, small edits get postponed and the site goes stale a little at a time. If the site was built so your team can make those edits, the cost is smaller, but it still exists, and someone should own it.

None of this is an argument against building a website. It is an argument for pricing the whole life of one. Before you sign, the questions worth asking are short:

Our own answer is that the build and the years after it are one engagement, so the site stays hosted, updated, backed up, and checked as its content changes, with one person to email when something is wrong. The details are on the services page. The questions above are worth asking whoever you hire, including us. The site you are paying for is mostly the one you will still have in three years, and a quote only describes the first few months of it.