A blog about not overpaying

Your website does not need to be a software project.

Most small business sites are five pages that never change. They are being run on a platform built to publish a newspaper — and billed accordingly, forever. There is a smarter way to do this.

$1,340

A typical five-year spend on a five-page managed site.

Hosting, licences, one refresh

19

Plugins running on a five-page brochure site.

Representative, not a record

14 kB

What a site like that needs to weigh.

The same pages as static HTML

$0

What hosting it then costs.

Free tier, no card

Illustrative composites — real figures, representative examples rather than one client's invoices. How that works.

The whole argument, on one screen.

Need a form? There is a service for that. Need analytics? Same. Once the site is built, it is built — nothing to update, nothing to secure, nothing to renew. It is a little more work up front, and then it is done.

What Managed WordPress Plain HTML
Hosting $18/mo, managed $0, free tier
Updates Core, theme, 19 plugins — weekly None. It is a file.
Attack surface Login page, PHP, plugin code Static HTML
Editing text Log in, find the block, hope Open the file, type
If you vanish It breaks within a year It keeps serving
Five pages, five years, no shop, no logins.