People budget for the build and assume that's the cost. Then a renewal shows up, or an agency line item they didn't expect, and the website feels like a leak. It shouldn't. Here is the entire list of what a site actually costs to keep running — separated honestly into required and optional.
Required: the domain
Your domain name renews every year, paid directly to a registrar. For a normal business domain this is roughly the price of a couple of coffees per year. It is the one cost that is genuinely non-negotiable, because the name is the business. Put it on auto-renew and never think about it again.
Required: hosting
The site has to live somewhere. For a small hand-coded site, hosting is cheap — often a few dollars a month, sometimes effectively nothing on modern static hosting. This is paid to the host, not to whoever built the site. That distinction is the whole point: it's an ordinary utility bill, not a fee for permission to use your own website.
That's the required list. It's short.
Domain plus hosting. For a small site that's frequently under twenty dollars a month, all in, paid to providers — not a designer. Everything past this point is a choice, not a requirement, and you should treat anyone who blurs that line with suspicion.
Optional: maintenance
If you want someone on call for changes, monitoring, content updates, and "something looks broken" — that's a retainer, and ours starts at $99/month. It is genuinely optional. Plenty of clients run for a year on hosting alone and email us only when they want something new. You should be able to cancel a retainer any month without the site so much as flickering. If you can't, that's not maintenance, it's a hostage situation.
Optional: changes and growth
New page, new section, a rebrand in two years — real work, quoted when you want it, not a standing charge. The difference between this and a subscription is that you only pay when you actually ask for something. We covered the philosophy in subscriptions: optional, never required.
The cost that should never exist
A monthly fee just to keep the site online, paid to the company that built it, with nothing delivered for it. That's the builder model and the lock-in agency model, and it's the thing we built the company to not do. If "keep your website live" is a line item separate from hosting, you're paying rent on something you supposedly own — that's the no-subscription website point in one sentence.
The honest three-year picture
A one-time build, plus domain and hosting (a small utility cost), plus whatever changes you actively choose to commission. No mandatory recurring fee to the builder. Compare that to a builder subscription or a locked retainer over the same three years and the gap isn't small — and at the end of it, in one model you own an asset and in the other you own nothing.
Want the real number for your situation, after the build? Tell us the scope at info@mule-digital.com or via /project and we'll lay out the full three-year cost with the optional parts clearly marked as optional.