“Website maintenance” quotes run from a few dollars a month to thousands, and the spread isn’t dishonesty — it’s that the word bundles four different things. Separate them and every quote becomes legible:
1. Staying online. The domain and the hosting. Unavoidable, small, and the same idea for everyone.
2. Keeping the machinery current. Software updates, security patches, backups, monitoring. This cost is almost entirely determined by what the site is built on — it’s large for plugin-and-database stacks and materially smaller for static ones.
3. Changing the site. New pages, updated pricing, fresh photos. This is work you request, priced as labor, and it exists on every architecture.
4. Marketing. SEO retainers, content programs, ad management. Real services — but not maintenance. Marketing services can also be folded into a maintenance/support plan without being itemized. If a maintenance quote is much larger than the technical upkeep described here, check whether it also includes marketing, content, monitoring or support. Ask.
Bucket 1: staying online
The floor everyone pays. A .com domain runs roughly $11–$19 per year at mainstream registrars — Porkbun charges about $11 flat, Namecheap about $11 the first year and $18.48 at renewal, and renewal price is the one that matters.
Hosting depends on architecture. It’s bundled into a builder’s subscription, it’s a separate plan you buy for self-hosted WordPress, and for a small static site it often sits inside a host’s published free allowance or costs a few dollars a month. That’s why this bucket has no single number — price the components instead: domain renewal, plus either hosting or the platform plan that already includes it.
One caveat: no hosting-price source is cited on this page, so treat any range here as a rough illustration rather than a measured market band, and check your own host’s published rate. Off a platform, domain plus hosting for a small site can land anywhere from tens to a few hundred dollars a year. On a builder, staying online is inside the subscription — which at the plan prices below runs a few hundred dollars a year by itself.
Bucket 2: keeping the machinery current — the architecture-dependent one
This is where quotes diverge, because the underlying obligation diverges.
Hosted builders (Wix, Squarespace): the platform maintains the machinery — that’s a real part of what the subscription buys. Entry-to-mid plans run roughly $16–$40/month (Wix lists Light at $17.77 and Business at $39.77 on annual billing). Bucket 2 cost beyond the subscription: effectively zero. This is the honest strength of builders, and any comparison that omits it is selling something.
WordPress: the machinery is yours to maintain. WordPress’s own documentation says to “always update WordPress to the latest version”, the same for plugins and themes — auto-updates for which are opt-in, not default — and to back up before updating. That’s a genuine recurring obligation, and it’s why a real market of care plans exists: published tiers run $89–$359/month at WP Buffs and $99–$799/month at Pronto. DIY is legitimate too — the cost then is your hours plus the risk of an update breaking something with no one on call.
Static sites (how TruePoint builds): no database, no CMS, no plugins — so the recurring software-update and security-patch obligation is materially smaller than on a plugin or CMS stack. That isn’t the same as no technical responsibility: a static site still depends on hosting or a CDN, DNS, form handling, third-party integrations, and — whenever it’s rebuilt — its build dependencies, toolchain, and deployment configuration. What mostly goes away is the monthly patch-and-monitor cycle, not every obligation. The tradeoff sits in bucket 3: with no CMS, you don’t log in and edit pages yourself.
| Recurring bucket | Hosted builder | WordPress | Static / custom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staying online | in subscription ($16–40/mo) | domain + hosting | domain + minimal hosting |
| Machinery upkeep | included | DIY hours or ~$90–360/mo plans | no plugin/CMS patch cycle; host, DNS, forms, build setup still apply |
| Content changes | DIY (included) | DIY or per-job | per-job |
Bucket 3: changing the site
Every architecture pays this one — the difference is who does the work and how it’s priced. On a builder you can often make routine changes yourself, or pay someone to do them — free in money and real in hours if you do it yourself. On WordPress you edit within what the theme allows, or pay hourly. On a static site, changes go through whoever maintains it, usually quoted per job.
The pricing-model question matters more than the platform here: is there a retainer whether or not work happens, or do you pay per change? Flat fee, hourly, or retainer covers what each structure quietly rewards. For a site whose content changes a few times a year, per-job pricing can total less than the smallest retainer. Run that against your actual change volume rather than assuming it either way. For a site changing weekly, self-editing dominates — which is a reason to choose a different architecture, not a bigger retainer.
Bucket 4: marketing — check what’s in the envelope
An “all-in-one maintenance plan” at several hundred a month often contains: hosting (bucket 1, worth tens), updates (bucket 2, architecture-dependent), “content updates” (bucket 3, capped hours you may not use), and SEO (bucket 4, marketing). None of that is improper — but you can’t evaluate the price until it’s unbundled. The question that unbundles it: “If I stop paying, what stops happening — and what breaks?” “Your site goes down” means the plan contains your hosting. “Nothing breaks, but the work stops” doesn’t mean the plan was empty — monitoring, backups, security work, and someone on call can all stop without anything failing that day. It means the value sits in services and labor you can price separately, and then decide whether to buy per job, from someone else, or not at all.
What this means over three years — recurring costs only
Rough arithmetic for a typical small-business brochure site, using the published figures above. These are recurring operating costs over three years and exclude the price of building the site, so they aren’t a total cost of ownership: a builder totals roughly $600–$1,500 (subscription and domain, your own labor free-in-money); WordPress with a care plan roughly $3,400–$13,000+ (hosting, domain, plan tiers, occasional paid changes) — or far less DIY, priced in your hours and risk; a static site roughly $50–$500 where hosting stays inside a free or low-cost tier, more on a paid host plan, plus whatever changes you commission. These are structurally different numbers because they’re structurally different obligations, not because any one vendor is gouging. The build price and the recurring price are one decision, which is why this guide and what a website costs up front are a pair.
Where TruePoint sits
TruePoint doesn’t require a monthly technical-maintenance retainer, and bucket 2 above is the reason: on a static site that work is small enough that billing monthly against it would be charging you for a standing obligation that isn’t standing. The hosting, DNS, form, and build-setup responsibilities named there don’t vanish; at this scale they’re handled as they come up rather than on a subscription. What we do instead: defects in the agreed scope are fixed free for 30 days after launch, and changes after that are quoted per job — bucket 3, priced as the labor it is, with no retainer.
The tradeoff is real and we’d rather you pick it deliberately: no CMS means changes go through a person rather than a login. If your business updates its site weekly, a builder or a CMS build serves you better than we do — custom vs. website builders is the honest version of that comparison. If your site changes a few times a year, paying per change beats paying per month, and what you’d own at the end is the other half of that argument.