What does a website really cost? The five-year calculation

“What does a website cost?” The honest answer: it depends less on the entry price than on everything that comes after. A website is not a one-off purchase like a shop sign. It needs hosting, security updates, backups and small changes again and again. So when you compare offers, do not compare the first amount, compare the total over several years.

The five cost blocks of a business website

1. Creation: planning, design, texts, technology. One-off.
2. Hosting and domain: the server the site runs on and your address on the web. Ongoing.
3. Maintenance and security: updates, monitoring, backups. Ongoing.
4. Licences: with a CMS mainly premium plugins and themes. Usually annual.
5. Changes: new texts, prices, services, images. Again and again.

Many offers only name the first block. The other four appear once the site is online, and then they add up year after year.

The hidden costs of a CMS

A CMS such as WordPress looks cheap because the software is free. A business site, however, almost always needs extensions. Three widely used examples with vendor list prices (October 2026, excl. VAT):

These figures apply to exactly three plugins and a single website. Forms, security, backups, multiple languages or bookings come on top as needed. Prices may change; check the current list prices for your offer.

Even more important than the licences is working time. Someone has to install updates, check that everything works afterwards and fix errors when two plugins do not get along. Do it yourself and it costs your time. Have it done and it costs a maintenance contract or hourly invoices.

The calculation for a custom website

At Catinity the calculation is deliberately simple. Creation costs €999, €1,499 or €2,999 as a package, depending on the number of pages. Hosting then costs from €8.90 per month, however many pages your website has. It includes SSL encryption, daily backups, server updates, outage alerts and forms by email. There are no plugin licences because there are no plugins.

You only need your own database once your website has bookings, customer accounts or a portal. A website that informs and sends enquiries by email stays at from €8.90 per month. Changes are added according to effort (€80 per hour, price up front), and your domain fee depends on the extension. Neither is included here. To put this figure into context, place your current or a pending CMS offer next to it: creation plus five years of hosting, plus five years of maintenance contract, plus five years of plugin licences, plus the changes you ordered in that time. Only that total is comparable.

What hosting costs on the market

Hosting on its own is not expensive. It gets expensive when a website needs a lot of computing power: a database, a shop, a login or a CMS that assembles every page anew on each visit. The number of pages, by contrast, hardly matters for a pre-generated website.

With cheap web space you look after software, updates and backups yourself. Managed WordPress takes some of that off your hands but costs several times as much, because a CMS needs more computing power. Sources: ALL-INKL (opens in a new tab) , IONOS (opens in a new tab) , STRATO (opens in a new tab) , Raidboxes (opens in a new tab) .

The biggest item nobody plans for: changes

Over five years a lot changes in every business: prices, services, staff, opening hours, photos. Each of these changes used to be a small order with coordination, implementation and an invoice. That is why many were never made, and the website became outdated.

With AI the effort for a small change has dropped considerably. At Catinity you describe in the portal what you need, get a price according to effort up front and pay from your credit balance. There is no fixed monthly fee for changes you may never need. How it works in detail is described in Website changes: fast and affordable with AI .

What no table shows

• Lost enquiries: a slow or outdated site loses visitors before they enquire. No invoice shows that.
• Outages: a hacked site costs time, nerves and sometimes Google rankings.
• Legal warnings: unlicensed images or embedded Google Fonts have already led to cease-and-desist letters in Germany.
• Your time: every hour in the page editor is missing in the business.

More on the legal pitfalls is in Accessibility and legal warnings: what small businesses need to know . Why the higher entry price of a custom site still pays off is explained in Built, not clicked together .