Two business models that the monthly price does not distinguish
A tradesperson or small business owner comparing website offers looks first at the monthly fee, because that is the figure on display. Yet this comparison leaves out what most distinguishes these offers from one another: who owns the result, and what is left of it on the day the provider is no longer paid.
Website creation offers fall into two families, regardless of their price.
In the first, the site is hosted and run by the provider, on its infrastructure and in its format. The subscription covers building, hosting, changes and support. Everything works as long as the payments continue.
In the second, the site is built once, then handed over. The code is placed in an account in the client's name, hosting is taken out in the client's name, and the provider has no technical role once delivery is complete. They may step in later, but nothing depends on them for the site to stay online.
These two models show similar prices in the first year. They diverge completely from the third year onwards.
What remains once you stop paying
In the subscription model, stopping payment usually means the site is taken offline. This point appears in the terms and conditions, rarely in the sales pitch, and it is often discovered at the moment you try to leave.
The consequences go beyond the web address disappearing. Pages gradually drop out of search results, and the rankings built up over months are lost. The content written, the photos organised and the service descriptions can sometimes be exported, but in a format specific to the platform, unusable elsewhere without being redone. Shared links and addresses given to customers point to a page that no longer responds.
A site handed over to the client behaves differently, not out of generosity but by design: it does not run on any infrastructure belonging to the provider. There is therefore no switch to flip.
The real cost is measured over five years
An offer at €29 a month comes to €1,740 over five years. That amount is not unreasonable for a full service including hosting, changes and support. What deserves scrutiny is the residual value: at the end of the five years, stopping payment takes you back to zero.
For a comparable scope, a brochure website invoiced once (our starting price is shown at the top of this page) costs less from the third year onwards, and you keep it. The trade-off is real and should be stated: changes are no longer included. They are billed for the time spent, or made by the owners themselves from an admin area.
The two models compared point by point:
Cost over five years: around €1,740 for a subscription at €29 a month; a single payment for a site handed over to the client.
Situation after payment stops: the subscription site goes offline; the handed-over site stays online, unchanged.
Ownership of the code: the provider for the subscription; the client for the handed-over site.
Changing provider: means rebuilding the site with a subscription; possible without rebuilding for a handed-over site.
Text changes: included in the subscription; free from the admin area, or billed if outsourced, for a handed-over site.
Hosting: included in the subscription; €0 for a static site.
Why hosting a brochure website can cost nothing
Free hosting comes as a surprise, and it is often taken for a loss leader. In reality it results from a technical choice whose effects can be measured.
A so-called dynamic site builds each page at the moment it is requested: a server runs code, queries a database, assembles the result, then sends it. This server works on every visit, consumes resources continuously, and is therefore billed monthly. This is how most sites built on WordPress or on an online platform work.
A so-called static site builds all its pages in advance, once and for all. The host then simply sends a file that is already prepared, just as it would send an image. No computation, no database. Several hosts serve this type of site without charging for traffic or bandwidth: a hundred or a hundred thousand visits a month amount to the same thing, because there is nothing to meter.
This choice has two related effects. Display time is much shorter, which weighs on search rankings and on the enquiry rate, a subject covered in our article on web performance and its impact on revenue. And the attack surface shrinks: with no extensions and no database, there is no known vulnerability to patch in a hurry on a site left without maintenance.
The domain name remains payable in every case, typically €10 to €15 a year, paid to the registrar.
What to have clarified before signing
Three elements determine the owner's real position, and they are rarely spelled out unprompted.
Ownership of the code and transfer conditions
A contract that provides for the code to be handed over and allows another provider to take over puts the client in a position to leave. Conversely, code that cannot be transferred makes any competitive tendering purely theoretical, however satisfied you are.
What happens to the site if payment stops
The difference between losing access to the admin interface and the site being taken offline is considerable, and both wordings coexist in the terms and conditions found on the market. Have it stated in writing before ordering.
The total cost over two years, with no new features
Adding up the subscription, hosting where it is separate, maintenance and the price of changes gives a figure often far removed from the advertised monthly fee. Several offers with a low entry price charge for every text change individually.
What the paid part of a brochure website covers
The existence of tools that let you build a site yourself for free shifts the question. The technical result can be identical to that of a paid site: the same speed, the same €0 hosting, the same ownership of the code.
What remains paid is the work. Gathering and writing the copy, selecting the photographs, organising the pages around the searches that customers in the sector actually make, then putting the site online. In a competitive trade or across a wide service area, this structuring accounts for most of the difference in visibility between two sites that look alike.
There is also a technical limit, rarely stated: a site builder assembles predefined blocks. That is what makes it usable without particular skills, but it restricts how pages are organised, the hierarchy of headings and the links between content. A site built outside that framework does not have this constraint. The terms of our website creation service set out this division of work.
A commercial dependency, not a technical constraint
Nothing in the construction of a brochure website requires it to stop working when its owner stops paying. That dependency results from a choice of business model, perfectly legitimate when it is disclosed, and a problem when it is not.
The useful comparison is therefore not the monthly fee, but what you still own after five years. It is the only criterion that special offers do not change.