The hidden cost of a cheap website
There is a special kind of website that costs $400 and works — for about four months. Then the plugin conflicts start, the theme’s author disappears, and the checkout silently drops orders on Safari.
Cheap is rarely cheap. It is expensive, deferred. The invoice was small because the bill was sent to your future self: the migration, the rebuild, the week of sales that vanished while the site was down and nobody noticed.
When we scope a project, we price three things most quotes skip: maintenance reality, failure modes, and the second year. That is why our numbers look higher up front and lower everywhere that matters — like month seven.
A website is not a purchase, it is an operation. It needs hosting that scales, patches that ship, backups that restore, and a human who answers. You can rent all of that piecemeal, or you can fold it into one flat monthly figure.
If you take financing out of the equation entirely, we would still build this way. The 12-month plan is not the product. The product is a project that is still excellent in year two.