How Much Does a Website Cost Per Year? The Sum Almost Nobody Adds Up
A garden maintenance firm outside Wrocław sat down in January to add up what it spends on marketing. The line marked “website” went quiet. The bank statement showed PLN 119 to a domain registrar in March, PLN 348 for hosting in September, PLN 59 a month to a company that “looks after the site”, and a single PLN 600 invoice for fixes booked in May. Four payments, three suppliers, no shared column anywhere. The owner had been telling people the site cost him “a couple of hundred a year”.
This article is about the bill that arrives after launch, not the price of building the thing. What it costs to have a site made, and how the four routes to one differ, we take apart separately in the piece on how much a business website costs. Here we care about year two and every year after it: what actually lands on your invoices, which lines are unavoidable, and which ones you pay out of sheer habit.
Why hardly anyone knows the number
The reason is mundane. The payments are scattered across the calendar and never meet on a single document. A domain renews on the anniversary of its registration, so in some random month. Hosting renews in another. A care plan leaves your card monthly, quietly, in an amount too small for anyone to query. Fixes turn up whenever something breaks and land in the books as “IT services”.
Two more things blur the picture. First, part of the money goes to whoever built the site, repackaged into their own invoice, so you cannot see how much of it is the server and how much is their margin. Second, growth spending (a blog, ads, photography) gets mixed in with running costs, and those are different categories. Running costs keep the site alive. Growth spending is what brings more customers through it.
What the annual bill is made of
Below are the lines that genuinely appear on small business invoices, with market ranges. Not every one applies to you, and that is exactly the point of the table.
| Line | What you get | Per year | Always needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain | the address your site sits on | PLN 28 (.eu) to PLN 120 (.pl) | yes |
| Hosting | the server holding your files | PLN 100-600 | yes, unless it is included |
| SSL certificate | the padlock in the address bar | PLN 0, or PLN 200-600 if charged | yes, but not as an extra |
| Technical care | updates, monitoring, backups | PLN 0 to 4,800 | depends on the technology |
| Plugin and theme licences | renewals, year after year | PLN 200-900 | WordPress only |
| Backups | the ability to undo a bad day | PLN 0-200 | yes |
| Small edits | your developer’s hours | PLN 100-200 per hour | depends how often you change things |
| Email on your domain | a proper company inbox | PLN 0-120 | nearly always |
Two of those lines deserve a closer look. A paid SSL certificate is a relic: a free certificate looks identical to a browser and to your customer, and the difference shows up only on the invoice. If the padlock costs you PLN 400 a year, you are paying for nothing. The second is technical care, because that name covers two completely different jobs sold under one label. We pull them apart in the article on what website care is worth paying for.
Where the WordPress and static site gap comes from
Most of your annual bill is decided by the technology somebody chose for you. WordPress runs on the server and assembles each page on request. It has a core, plugins and a theme, and every one of those gets security patches. Somebody has to apply them, check that nothing broke afterwards, and keep backups for the times when something does. That is real work and it costs real money.
A static site is a set of finished files that the server simply hands over. There are no plugins to patch and no admin panel to break into through a module nobody updated. Technical care shrinks to hosting, a certificate and backups, which together cost almost nothing. That does not mean a site needs nothing at all after launch. It needs a different kind of attention: somebody or something reading the numbers, adding content that matches what people actually search for, and telling you what follows from it. Different category, different money.
Three bills side by side
Take the same service business, the same five-page site, and three ways of keeping it running for a year.
| Model | What it adds up from | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress you run yourself | hosting PLN 300, domain PLN 120, licences PLN 400, updates in your evenings | about PLN 820 plus your time |
| WordPress with a care plan | the same, plus PLN 150 a month | about PLN 2,620 |
| Static site, done for you | renewal PLN 149, domain PLN 120 | about PLN 269 |
The first row hides a trap, because “free” here means your evenings and the risk that one stale plugin takes the site down mid-season. The third row looks suspiciously cheap until you notice there is simply nothing there to service. If you want to know what each of these lines actually pays for, we explain it in plain language in the piece on hosting, domains, SSL and DNS.
Audit your own payments in half an hour
You do not need an accountant for this. A business account statement covering the last twelve months and half an hour of quiet will do.
- Scan the statement for registrar and hosting company names. Write down the amounts and the months they appeared in.
- Check the WHOIS record to see whose name the domain is registered in. If it shows your developer, you have a bigger problem than a few dozen zloty a year.
- Ask whoever maintains the site for a list of the services they hold and their renewal dates. One email, no subtext needed.
- Check whether you pay separately for an SSL certificate. If you do, that is the first line to cancel.
- Add up the invoices for small edits. If several hundred zloty a year go on changing prices and opening hours, it is worth asking whether you could make those changes yourself.
The total of those five points is your true cost of ownership. In most small firms it comes to roughly twice what the owner assumed before counting.
What it costs with us
At Sitario you pay once for the build and the first year of running costs: a Start site is PLN 249 one off, and that covers hosting, the certificate, backups and analytics. Renewal starts only in year two, at PLN 149 a year on Start, PLN 249 on Business and PLN 449 on Premium. We register the domain in your name at the registrar’s rate with no margin added, so renewing it costs exactly what it would if you bought it yourself. There is no separate line for technical care, because a static site has nothing to patch.
Growth money sits apart, and we call it that on purpose. The blog add-on is PLN 49 a month, or PLN 69 as a one-off pool of 20,000 characters, and with Google ads you set the monthly budget yourself anywhere between PLN 300 and PLN 5,000. That spending exists to bring in enquiries, not to keep a server breathing. Which scope makes sense at your scale, we work through in the article on which website plan to choose.
When a bigger bill is fair
Some businesses pay PLN 3,000 a year for a website and get their money’s worth. A shop wired into a stock system needs updates, testing and somebody reachable by phone. So does a booking service with a calendar and payments. A listings portal, an app, a site with hundreds of pages edited by a team: in all of those, somebody works on it all year and that work costs.
The model described here is not for those businesses. It is for the small service firm that needs a site showing what it does, where it works and how to get in touch, and then wants to be left alone. If your site has to do more than that, budget for a monthly fee and treat it as the cost of a working tool rather than a line to cut.
In short
Remember three numbers from your own bill: what you pay for the domain, what you pay for space on a server, and what you pay for somebody’s labour. In a small firm the first two rarely pass PLN 500 a year. The third can be many times higher, and it decides whether your annual cost lands nearer PLN 300 or PLN 3,000.
Run the audit once, save the result in a single file and open it again next year. It takes half an hour, and the answer to “what does this website cost me” stops beginning with the words “I think”.