The hosting bill is small. What adds up is the changes, the licenses and the hours nobody totals. Tell us how your website runs today and you'll see the yearly cost line by line, right next to what it would cost with us.
In short: with the defaults (3 changes a month, one language, no new articles) the calculator comes to about €4,260 a year with an agency, €2,800 with a freelancer, €2,180 with self-managed WordPress (€1,500 of that is your own time) and €900 with a site builder. The biggest cost is almost never hosting. It's the changes, billed by the hour.
| Assumption | Agency | Freelancer | WordPress, yourself | Site builder |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting, contract or subscription a month | €150 | €80 | €15 | €25 |
| Licenses and plugins a year | €300 | €400 | €500 | €0 |
| Hourly rate | €120 | €80 | €50* | €50* |
| Minutes billed per change | 30 | 30 | 30 | 20 |
| Price per article | €300 | €250 | €250 | €250 |
| Your own hours on updates a month | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
* If you do it yourself, we value your time at €50 an hour. Set the hourly rate to 0 if you'd rather not count it. Every extra language makes each change half as much work again, because it has to be translated. On WordPress it also needs a translation plugin, about €150 a year, which we fill into the licenses field for you. If you type in your own licenses figure, we count it exactly as entered.
The defaults are deliberately the low end of the ranges we break down in How much does a website cost per month? Agencies bill €90 to €150 an hour and rarely less than half an hour per change. A care plan runs from €50 to €500 a month, and WordPress licenses quickly add up to €700 to €1,500 a year. What applies to your site is covered in website maintenance cost and what a WordPress website really costs.
On our side, the calculator picks the smallest plan that covers what you entered: Basic at €350 a year (up to 10 changes a month, one language), Premium at €500 (unlimited changes, 2 articles a month, up to 3 languages) or Growth at €1,000 (8 articles a month, up to 5 languages). Add a one-time €250 setup. Hosting and SSL are included, and there are no plugins, so there are no licenses. All prices are net, plus VAT.
The domain and email inboxes are left out, because you pay for them either way, and so are one-off costs like a redesign. The costs that tend to be missing from a quote are covered in questions to ask a web designer.
And if the numbers say it's time to move on: how to switch web design agencies without losing your domain, email or rankings.
We rebuild your homepage for free and send you the link. If you like it, we do the rest. If you don't, it costs you nothing.
Want to see the plans first? Done-for-you care in detail