- 01A website has three separate costs on three timelines: the build (one-off), the run (monthly), and keeping it moving after launch — the one almost nobody prices up front.
- 02The run cost is knowable in advance on a posted rate card, which makes it the easiest of the three to budget.
- 03Keeping a site moving after launch usually falls to one of four options: a full-time hire, an agency retainer, DIY drift, or it just stops changing.
- 04Priced over three years, a flat hosting plan plus a flat iteration add-on beats unpriced DIY hours or per-change agency billing.
A website is three costs, not one
Ask what a website costs and most people quote one number: the hosting bill, or the invoice from whoever built it. Neither is the real answer, because a website has three separate costs that show up on three different timelines — the build (one-off), the run (monthly, for as long as it's live), and the one almost nobody prices up front: keeping it moving — every change it needs after launch, for as long as it matters to the business.
Get the first two right and still lose on the third. This guide walks through all three, with the run and the iteration costs grounded in an actual rate card rather than a guess — so the three-year math at the end is arithmetic, not marketing.
The build
This is the cost most quotes are actually about: deciding what the thing needs to do, designing it, and building it. It's real work and it's a one-off — done once, ideally done right by a team that also understands how the result will run afterward, not handed off cold to whoever happens to host it. That's the shape CustomLabs builds to: the build and the ten years of iteration after it are one continuous relationship, not two vendors who've never spoken.
Get the build cost right and it still says nothing about what the site costs to keep alive — that's the next two sections.
The run
Running a site is where a flat rate earns its keep. The whole plan ladder is posted, not quoted: Static Starter from $5/mo, Static Pro from $15/mo, and dedicated compute from Dedicated S at $29/mo up through Dedicated M at $59/mo and Dedicated L at $99/mo — TLS, DNS, backups, monitoring, and patching included in every tier, not billed as add-ons later. See the full rate card for the complete ladder, or run your own numbers on the self-serve estimator without talking to anyone first.
Contrast that with a metered bill, where the "run" number moves every month because it's a function of traffic nobody fully controls — the flat-rate vs. usage-based hosting guide covers why that happens and what a flat number changes. For this guide, the point is simpler: the run cost is knowable in advance, which means it's the easiest of the three costs to budget — and the least likely one to be the actual problem three years in.
The part everyone forgets: keeping it moving
A site is never really done. Copy goes stale, a form needs a new field, a page needs to load faster, an integration changes underneath you. Once it's live, every business faces the same question on a loop: who makes the next change, and what does that actually cost? There are four common answers:
- Hire a developer
- A full-time salary to keep one property moving — the most capable option and, for most single-site businesses, wildly oversized for the amount of actual change-work available.
- An agency retainer
- A recurring fee buys a place in a queue, then a day-rate or ticket price for the change itself — responsive, but the meter runs on every request, and small changes rarely feel small on the invoice. (Running the agency side of that arrangement? See ship the work, skip the ops desk.)
- DIY, and it drifts
- Whoever's free picks it up between other work. Changes ship slowly, inconsistently, and the backlog of "should really fix that" only grows.
- It just stops moving
- Nobody owns it, so nothing changes after launch. The site quietly goes stale while the business it represents doesn't.
There's a fourth option that doesn't cost a salary or run by the hour: brief the change in plain language, let CodeHerder's agent open a pull request against the real repository, and ship it through the same pipeline already serving the site — human-reviewed, at the flat Agentic iteration — CodeHerder add-on price of $25/mo. That's the Build → Iterate → Run loop, andkeep shipping without a dev team walks through how a change moves from brief to merged in practice.
Three years, added up
Put all three costs on the same timeline and the shape becomes obvious. The build is a one-off, so it's left out of the table below on purpose — this is the running cost of keeping a site alive and actively improving for 3 years, the horizon where "keeping it moving" usually outweighs everything else:
| Cost path | What's actually in it | 3 years, all-in |
|---|---|---|
| DIY / self-host | Near-zero sticker price, then every certificate renewal, backup, patch, and future change comes out of someone's week for 36 months straight — see should you host it yourself? for the hour-by-hour method to price that honestly. | Mostly unpriced hours |
| Agency retainer | A recurring retainer plus a day-rate or ticket price for every change after launch — the hosting part may be flat, but the iteration meter never stops. | Retainer + per-change billing |
| CustomHosted + CodeHerder | Static Pro ($15/mo) or Dedicated M ($59/mo) plus the Agentic iteration — CodeHerder add-on ($25/mo) — flat, and unchanged whether the site ships one change a year or one a week. | $40/mo → $1,440 total, or $84/mo → $3,024 total |
The first two rows don't get a dollar total here on purpose — nobody's hours or agency contract are the industry average, and pricing them as if they were would be exactly the kind of number this guide is arguing against. The third row does get one, because it's the one built entirely from a posted rate card: two real plans, the iteration add-on, 36 months, multiplied out.
Where the hours really go
The reason this math matters: on a DIY or ad-hoc site, the biggest line item is time nobody priced — the evening spent patching a server, the week a "quick fix" sat in someone's backlog, the hours spent relearning a stack nobody's touched since launch. None of that shows up on an invoice, which is exactly why it's so easy to under-count. A flat hosting rate plus a flat iteration add-on turns both of the expensive, unpredictable parts of running a site into two fixed numbers — see should you host it yourself? for pricing the hours honestly, and flat-rate vs. usage-based hosting for why a fixed number beats a variable one on the hosting side specifically.
Add it up over 3 years and the real cost of a website was never the hosting line — it's whatever happens (or doesn't) every time the site needs to change after launch.The hours ledger runs that math for you, row by row.