How Much Does a Website Cost per Month After Launch

A simple business website costs very little to keep running month to month: a domain renewal (billed yearly), hosting, and nothing else if the site is static and nobody touches it. Costs start to appear when the site has a CMS, forms, payments, integrations or regular content changes — then you are paying for updates, monitoring and someone's time. Support plans at our studio start from 9 900 ֏/month, and the exact figure depends on what the site does; it follows a 30-minute brief.

The honest answer is that "per month" is the wrong unit for part of this. Domains are annual. Hosting is monthly or annual. Support is monthly only if you actually need changes made. Below is the full list so you can add up your own number.

What you pay for every month (or every year)

Domain. Billed once a year by the registrar. Price depends on the extension — .com, .ru, .am and .pt all cost different amounts, and some registrars charge more on renewal than on the first year. Check the renewal price, not the promo price. Keep the domain registered in the company's own account, not your developer's.

Hosting. This is the real monthly line. Shared hosting is enough for a landing page or a ten-page company site. A store with a catalog, a portal with logins, or an admin panel needs a VPS or cloud instance, and the cost scales with traffic, database size and background jobs. If someone quotes you hosting without asking what the site does, they are guessing.

Email on your domain. Mailboxes at yourcompany.com are usually a per-user monthly fee from Google Workspace, Zoho, Yandex or your hosting provider. Not the website's cost strictly speaking, but it lands in the same budget.

Paid services the site depends on. SMS codes, a transactional email sender, a maps API above the free tier, a payment provider's fees, a booking widget, a chat widget, a CRM seat. Each is small. Together they are often larger than hosting.

Support and updates. Someone has to install CMS and plugin updates, renew certificates when they do not renew themselves, restore from backup when a deploy breaks something, and make the text and photo changes you ask for. This is the line that varies most, because it is time, not infrastructure.

What usually costs nothing

An SSL certificate. Let's Encrypt is free and renews automatically on any competent hosting setup. If you are being billed monthly for "SSL protection" on a brochure site, ask why.

Basic analytics. Google Analytics 4, Yandex Metrica and Google Search Console are free. Paid analytics makes sense when you run real ad budgets and need cleaner attribution, not before.

A CDN for a small site. Cloudflare's free tier covers a landing page or company site comfortably.

The CMS itself, if it is open source. WordPress, Strapi and friends cost nothing to license. Commercial platforms and some premium plugins charge annually — know which ones you are on before renewal arrives.

When you do not need to pay for support

If your site is five static pages, the content has not changed since launch, and nothing is connected to it — you do not need a monthly plan. Pay hosting, renew the domain, and call someone the day you actually want a change. A retainer for a site nobody edits is money for nothing.

The same applies if you have an in-house person who can edit pages in the admin panel. Then you need an arrangement for technical problems, not a monthly allowance of content edits.

Where a plan does earn its money: the site takes payments or bookings; it talks to a CRM, 1C, WhatsApp or Telegram; you publish content or change prices weekly; downtime costs you orders; or you are running ads and every broken form is paid traffic thrown away. In those cases you are buying response time, not maintenance in the abstract.

What a support plan should actually include

Ask for these in writing before you sign anything:

• Automated backups, how often, where they are stored, and a test restore at least once.
• CMS, plugin and server updates, with a staging copy so updates are not tested on your live site.
• Uptime monitoring and who gets the alert at 2am.
• A defined response time for "the site is down" versus "please change this phone number".
• A number of hours or requests per month for small changes, and the rate once you exceed them.
• SSL and domain renewal tracking, so nothing expires silently.

If the plan is only "we are available", you are paying for availability you cannot verify.

How to keep the monthly cost predictable

Own your accounts: domain registrar, hosting, analytics, payment provider. Grant access to your contractor rather than letting them register things under their own name. Migrating later is unpleasant when you do not control the registrar.

Keep the stack small. Every widget and plugin is a future update, a possible breakage and sometimes a renewal invoice. A custom-built site with few dependencies has a lower running cost than a template loaded with twenty plugins, even if it costs more to build. For reference, a landing page or company website starts from 149 000 ֏, and the exact price follows a brief — but the build price and the monthly price move in opposite directions more often than people expect.

Finally, separate marketing from running costs. Ad budgets, SEO work and content production are often bundled into "the website costs X per month" and then the website gets blamed for a number it did not create. Keep them on separate lines so you can see what each one returns.

Frequently asked questions

Can I run a business website for free?

You can host a static site for free on services like Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages, but you still pay for the domain, and you have no support when something breaks. Fine for a personal page, thin for a company that gets leads through it.

Is hosting cheaper if I pay for a year?

Usually yes, and the discount is worth taking once the site is stable. Pay monthly for the first few months in case you need to change provider or resource tier.

What happens if I stop paying for support?

The site keeps working as long as hosting and the domain are paid. Over months, outdated CMS and plugin versions accumulate security holes, and the first serious problem costs more to fix than the plan would have cost. Static sites with no CMS can sit untouched much longer.