The pitch is a small monthly number. The reality is that small number plus several other numbers you discover one at a time, usually right when you need the thing they're gating. I'm not against builders for everyone. I'm against the pricing page that hides the real total. Here's the bill that doesn't show up until you're already in.
The advertised price is the price of the unusable version
The cheapest plan is real, and it's the one you can't actually run a business on. Want to use your own domain instead of their branding in the address? That's the next tier. Want their ads off your site? Higher tier. The headline number isn't the lie — it's just the price of the version no real business uses, and you learn that after you've built the site, not before.
The fees that arrive one at a time
In the rough order owners hit them:
Your own domain. Often gated above the entry plan, sometimes free the first year then quietly renewing higher.
Removing their branding. Looking like a real business instead of a free trial is an upgrade.
Anything transactional. Taking payment, bookings, a real form — frequently a higher tier or a per-transaction cut, or both.
Email that matches your domain. you@yourbusiness.com instead of a generic address — usually a separate add-on.
The features in the templates. The thing that looked included in the demo — a gallery, a popup, a connector — is regularly a paid app on top.
Each one is individually small and individually defensible. Stacked, the real monthly cost is routinely a multiple of the advertised one, paid forever, and we ran that comparison in detail here.
The fee that isn't money
Here's the expensive one, and it never appears as a line item: time, and lock-in.
The time is the evenings — the editor that fights you, the change that takes an hour, the year-after-year of small fights with software. That's unbilled and very real, and for a busy owner it's usually the biggest cost of the whole thing.
The lock-in is worse. You can't take a builder site with you. There's no "export the working site and host it elsewhere." Stop paying and it's gone — not yours, never was. So every monthly fee is also rent on something you'll never own, and the day you want out, the exit cost is rebuilding from scratch. We've said it plainly: what happens when you stop paying is the question the pricing page is built to keep you from asking.
Run the honest number
Don't compare a one-time build to the headline monthly. Compare it to the real monthly — the tier you'll actually need with the add-ons you'll actually buy — times the years you'll actually run it, plus the evenings, plus a rebuild at the end because you own nothing. Do that arithmetic over five years. For most small businesses the "cheap" builder is the expensive option and it isn't close; it just bills slowly enough that nobody adds it up.
What we do instead
We charge once. Design, build, content, the search setup, and the source files, handed to you, yours. Hosting is a few dollars a month to a host you control, the domain is yours in your own account, and there's no fee to Mule to keep the site alive — our pricing is one page and the whole number is on it. If you're on a builder now and want the five-year math run against your actual plan, send us what you're paying. We'll do the arithmetic with you, honestly, including the cases where staying put is genuinely fine.