Two quotes land in the same week. One says £1,400, once. The other says a monthly figure and no setup fee. The monthly one looks like the expensive option because you can see it every month, and the lump sum looks like the cheap one because you only feel it once. That instinct is worth interrogating, because the arithmetic does not agree with it as quickly as most people assume.
What each price actually buys
The comparison only works if both sides are the same thing, and they usually are not. A one-off build is a design and a set of files. A subscription is a design, a set of files, and the ongoing work of keeping them online and current. Before comparing numbers, write down which of these each quote covers:
- Hosting. Somewhere for the site to live, billed monthly or annually, forever.
- The domain. Small, annual, and the one item you should insist is registered in your own name.
- An SSL certificate. Should cost nothing now. If it is a line item, ask why.
- Backups and security updates. Invisible until the week they are the only thing that matters.
- Uptime monitoring. The difference between finding out your site is down and a customer finding out.
- Changes. New number, new price, new photographs, a service you no longer offer.
A one-off build that excludes all six is not a comparable product to a subscription that includes all six. It is a lower price for a smaller thing.
Where the break-even actually falls
Take a typical freelance build at £1,200 and a typical managed subscription. On the raw numbers alone the subscription passes the lump sum somewhere around year two or three. But the lump sum is rarely alone: add hosting at £100 a year, and two or three changes a year at £75 each, and the gap closes to something like four or five years — which is longer than most trade websites survive before they need replacing anyway.
So the honest answer is: over a short horizon the subscription is cheaper, over a long one the lump sum is, and the crossover is far further out than the sticker prices suggest.
The question that decides it
Cost is the smaller half. The real question is what happens in eighteen months when you want to change something.
On a one-off build, that is a phone call, a quote and a wait, and if the freelancer has moved on it can mean finding someone willing to work on a stranger’s code. On a subscription, it is a message. Whether that is worth the difference depends entirely on how much you expect your business to change — new services, new areas, new accreditations, a second van — and on how much you want to think about your website at all.
The two things to settle before you sign either
- Who is the domain registered to? The answer should be you, with your own email on the account, whichever route you choose. Everything else is recoverable; a domain held by someone you have fallen out with is genuinely painful.
- What do you keep if you leave? Ask it plainly, get it in writing, and treat hesitation as the answer. A provider confident in its service will tell you exactly what happens when you stop paying.
Which to choose
Take the one-off build if you have the cash, you are comfortable arranging hosting and backups yourself, and you genuinely do not expect the site to change much. Take the subscription if you would rather the website simply worked and stayed worked without appearing on your to-do list. Neither is the clever choice — they are different products, and the expensive mistake is buying one while comparing it to the price of the other.
If you would rather judge the work than the pricing model, we’ll rebuild your homepage free in 48 hours, and you can decide what it is worth afterwards.