The monthly price is not the number that matters. This one is.
A website subscription is easy to stop noticing. It is $20 or $30 or $50, it comes out monthly, and it sits below the threshold where you would go looking for it. The bill that would make you act never arrives, because it arrives in sixty small pieces instead.
So here is the same money, added up.
| Monthly plan | One year | Five years | Ten years | What you own at the end |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $20/mo | $240 | $1,200 | $2,400 | Nothing |
| $30/mo | $360 | $1,800 | $3,600 | Nothing |
| $50/mo | $600 | $3,000 | $6,000 | Nothing |
Ten years is not a stretch for a small business website. Plenty of the sites on Salt Spring have been up that long. At $50 a month that is $6,000, and the answer in the last column does not change.
That last column is the part worth sitting with. At the end of five years of paying, you do not own a website. You own nothing. Stop paying and the site comes down — not "goes into read-only mode", not "stays up without updates". It comes down, and the address people have been typing for five years stops working.
| Renting | Owning | |
|---|---|---|
| Website hosting | $20–50/month | $0/month |
| Domain name | ~$15–25/year | ~$15–25/year |
| Five-year total | $1,300–3,100 | ~$100 |
| Ten-year total | $2,600–6,300 | ~$200 |
Free hosting sounds like a catch, so it is worth saying plainly where the zero comes from. A modern small-business website is a set of files. Serving files is close to free now, and the large hosting companies give it away at small scale because it costs them almost nothing and they hope you grow into something they can charge for. A brochure site for a massage practice or a bakery will not outgrow that tier. There is no trial period and no step-up price — the free tier is simply the product.
What you were paying for on Squarespace was never really the hosting. It was the editor, the templates, and the convenience of one company handling everything. Those are real things. They are just not $3,000 things once the site is built and you are not redesigning it.
Not everyone should move, and it is worth being honest about who should not:
If your site is between three and ten pages, and mostly it just sits there telling people what you do and how to reach you, you are paying a subscription price for a filing cabinet.
Moving a typical small-business site saves $250–600 a year, every year. Not year one only — the saving does not decay, because the thing you stopped paying for does not come back. Over five years that is somewhere between $1,200 and $2,900 that stays in the business.
What it costs to make the move is a one-time fee that depends on the size of the site, and for most small sites it pays for itself inside the first year.