Website Budgets: What It Costs to Build vs Run
The build is a project with a number attached, so it gets approved, scheduled, and celebrated. Running the site is an ongoing cost that nobody sponsors, so it gets skipped, and eighteen months later the answer to the decay is another build. That cycle is the most expensive way to own a website.
The two budgets
Build is design, content, development, migration, and launch. It is one-time, and it is the number everyone quotes.
Run is hosting, domain, licenses, backups, monitoring, updates, security, support, content, and the occasional improvement. It is monthly, it is smaller, and it determines whether the build retains its value.
A realistic run budget for a small business site
- Hosting and domain: $20 to $100 a month depending on tier and traffic.
- Software licenses: $10 to $60 a month for forms, backups, SEO, and anything premium.
- Maintenance and support: this is where plans range widely; the meaningful question is whether someone is responsible.
- Content: whatever cadence you have committed to, costed honestly in hours or fees.
- An improvement fund: even a few hundred dollars a quarter keeps a site evolving instead of aging.
The rule that avoids the rebuild cycle
Plan to spend something like 15 to 20% of the build cost per year on running and improving the site. A $20,000 site with a $300 annual budget will look neglected within two years; the same site with a modest ongoing allocation keeps earning for five or more.
How to make the case internally
Tie the run budget to a number the business already tracks. If the site produces 40 inquiries a month and you close a third at an average value you know, the monthly cost of keeping it healthy is a rounding error against the revenue it protects. Framed that way, it stops being an IT expense and becomes insurance on a working sales channel.
The cheapest version
If budget is genuinely tight, the priorities in order are: backups you have tested, updates applied on a schedule, uptime monitoring, and someone named as responsible. Those four cost very little and prevent most of the expensive outcomes.
