The hours ledger
Hosting costs money. Running it costs hours. Put your own numbers in below and see which one is actually the bigger bill.
Count it the way the guide already tells you to
Not a new formula — the same one should you host it yourself? already hands you on paper. This page just runs the arithmetic.
- 1
Count the hours a normal month takes
Patch windows, certificate checks, watching a dashboard, the odd late page — added up, not guessed at.
- 2
Apply your own hourly rate
Whatever that person would otherwise be doing — their salary line, plus the product work that doesn't happen while they're patching a server.
- 3
Add the incident tax
The evening an outage eats, or a restore that turns out not to work — infrequent, but not zero.
Put your own numbers in
Every default below is a starting point, not an average — the basis printed on each row says exactly what it assumes. Edit anything that doesn't match your own setup.
What stays with you
None of the rows above reach zero on their own — this is the part the ledger doesn't try to price away.
Deciding what to build
The product and roadmap calls are still yours — no ledger runs those for you.
Reviewing the pull request before it merges
An agent opens it; a human still reads the diff and clicks merge.
Your own content and domain calls
Pricing, copy, what the product actually does — that's yours either way.
Support in business hours
A person who answers, not a round-the-clock operations centre.
More on what a handover honestly stops at portability, what to expect from support, andwhere we're the wrong choice outright.
The hours don't disappear — they move
Whatever the ledger above adds up to is the same time freed for the product itself, plus one more line already sitting in it.
Hours that stop going to patch windows and pager duty go to the product instead — the feature list, the content, the calls only you can make. That's the trade this page makes explicit: not "save money," but spend the hours somewhere else.
The Shipping the small changes you'd make if there were time row above is that trade running in one direction on its own: brief a change in plain language, an agent opens a pull request against the real repository, a human reviews it, and it ships through the same pipeline already serving the site — no separate environment, no second queue. CustomLabs builds the first version; CodeHerder's agents keep iterating on it after launch; CustomHosted keeps the result running underneath. See the loop end to end atThe Loop, how to phrase a change atBrief a change, and three real examples with the actual diff stats at Case files.
Hours ledger questions
The follow-ups that come up once someone's actually filled the rows in.
01Where do the default hours come from?
Nowhere but this page's own assumptions, stated next to each row. They're starting points sized around one small production stack, not an industry average — nobody's setup is the average, so edit every field to match your own.
02What if I don't know my own hourly rate?
Use whatever that person would otherwise be doing with the time — their salary divided into hours, or a contractor rate if that is who currently does the work.
03Does the number ever reach zero?
No, and this page doesn't claim it does. Deciding what to build, reviewing a pull request before it merges, and your own content calls stay with you regardless — see What stays with you below.
04How is the incident tax worked into the monthly figure?
Incidents a year, times hours each, divided by twelve. It's the line most people forget to count because it doesn't show up every month — only in the month it happens.
05Where does the CodeHerder row come from?
It's the same agentic iteration add-on listed on the rate card, not a separate estimate — check the box and the ledger's cost side adds exactly what the add-on costs.
What the ledger connects to
- Should you host it yourself?
The three-step method this page runs for you, laid out in full — including when the honest answer is to keep doing it yourself.
- The real cost of a website
The same "where the hours really go" argument, with a three-year cost table alongside it.
- Pricing
This page's mirror image — size the money side of the same month.
- Compare
Weighing rolling it yourself against the alternatives? Dimension by dimension, including where we're the wrong choice.
- Performance
A different kind of ledger — the measured page-weight budget behind the "fast on the edge" claim.
- Patching
What the "patch windows" row above is pricing — the cadence, the severity table, and what a window costs you if it runs itself.
Ready to move some of these hours off your plate?
Describe the workload and get one fixed monthly rate in writing, within a business day.