The years after launch

You're the communications manager of a company of 40 people. In November, the finance director asks you for next year's website budget, and adds: "It's built and paid for, so the budget should be close to zero, right?"

It isn't. Three kinds of cost come back every year. They are the site's running costs:

• Hosting and the domain name, plus any service the site uses, such as sending emails, maps, a database or a booking tool.
• Subscriptions and fees, for platforms that charge each month or keep a share of each sale.
• Maintenance: security updates, fixes when something breaks, and the small changes every site needs. A common estimate is 15 to 20% of the build price, every year.

Maintenance can't be skipped. Outdated WordPress plugins are one of the most common ways sites get hacked. And skipped updates don't disappear. They accumulate, and the site gets harder and more expensive to update, until a security hole or a broken plugin forces a costly repair.

Your portfolio has running costs too, but small ones. A domain name costs about €10 to €20 a year, the hosting can stay on a free plan, and you'll spend a few hours a year adding projects and checking that the form still works.

Answer the finance director with a range, a low and a high figure, and with what each part pays for. One figure invites a debate about that figure. A range with its parts shows what the money buys.

• A WordPress site built for €6,000: hosting and the domain cost from about a hundred to a few hundred euros a year. Maintenance, at 15 to 20% of €6,000, is €900 to €1,200, mostly WordPress and plugin updates. That's roughly €1,000 to €1,500 a year.
• A customer portal built to measure for €40,000: maintenance at 15 to 20% is €6,000 to €8,000. Hosting and the services it uses add hundreds to a few thousand euros. That's roughly €7,000 to €10,000 a year, before any new feature.
• A Shopify shop selling €200,000 a year: Shopify handles the updates, so the 15 to 20% estimate fits less well. The subscription and paid apps cost a few hundred to a couple of thousand euros a year. The biggest line is the payment fees, about 1.5 to 3% of each sale: €3,000 to €6,000 a year. Write that line as a percentage of sales, not a fixed sum, so that it follows the sales.

The example below shows the first and the last of these budgets, line by line. In the shop's budget, the platform is the smaller cost, and the fees grow with every sale.

Two more lines are worth adding to the budget. The first is the time of someone inside the company. A site needs a person who updates the content, answers questions and talks to the agency. Even a few hours a month is a real cost. For the customer portal, that person also helps the clients who can't log in.

The second is a redesign every few years. Sites age, browsers change, and the company's needs change too. A redesign rebuilds the look of the site, and often its code. Plan for it, rather than discovering it on the day the site looks old.

You can pay for each fix when something breaks. Or you can sign a maintenance contract: a fixed yearly price, with a stated response time, the time within which the provider promises to start fixing a problem. A contract costs more than paying for each fix. But it makes the budget predictable, and it guarantees that someone answers when the site breaks on a Saturday.

You're the operations manager of a mid-sized company. Your CEO, M. Garnier, wants to pick whichever option costs less on day one. Cheaper on day one and cheaper over three years are different questions, and the answers can differ.

To compare, count everything each option costs over the same period. This is its total cost of ownership:

• The up-front cost: the build or the setup.
• Every running cost: subscriptions multiplied by users and months, hosting, and maintenance for anything custom.
• People's time: the hours someone inside the company spends running it.

Round numbers are enough, because you want to know which option is cheaper, and by roughly how much.

• A showcase site: a freelancer offers a website builder at €1,500, then €40 a month. That's about €3,000 over three years. An agency offers a custom site for €12,000, plus about €2,000 a year of maintenance: €16,000 to €20,000. Here the cheaper start is also several times cheaper in total, unless the site must do something a builder can't.
• Planning the visits of 150 technicians: a service at €30 per technician per month costs about €54,000 a year, so about €160,000 over three years. Your own tool costs €60,000, plus €9,000 to €12,000 a year of maintenance and some hosting: €90,000 to €100,000. On paper, the option that costs more on day one is the cheaper one. The diagram shows the two totals crossing after about 17 months.

Before you build anything, negotiate. At 150 users, a volume discount is normal, and perhaps not every technician needs a full licence.

Your team wants a project management tool. An open-source version, whose code is public, is free if you install and run it on your own server. Its makers can also run it for you, for €250 a month.

The free option isn't free. Someone has to install the tool, update it, back it up and fix it when it breaks. Running it yourself like this is called self-hosting. Once all that is counted, a day or two a month is common. At a few hundred euros per day of an engineer's time, that's several thousand euros a year, plus the server. The hosted version costs €3,000 a year, with updates and backups done for you. Choose it, unless someone already runs servers in the company, or the data must stay on the company's own machines.

The sums decide only part of the question, so weigh the risks too. Custom projects often overrun, which means they cost more and take longer than planned. So add a contingency, an extra amount for the problems nobody can predict. A provider can raise its prices. And a tool that one person runs stops being maintained when that person leaves.

Say clearly that your figures are rough, give ranges, and show what would change the answer, such as the discount that would make the service cheaper than building.

Ask these questions before you accept a budget that stops at launch, and before you choose between two options.

For a site that is already built, ask for every yearly cost: hosting, the domain, each subscription and its renewal date, the payment fees, and maintenance. Ask who installs the security updates, and what a maintenance contract would cost. Ask who inside the company runs the site, and how many hours a month it takes them.

To compare options, ask for the total over three years, counting every running cost and people's time, not only the first invoice. Ask what happens to the total if the provider raises its prices, if the custom build costs more than planned, or if the person who runs the tool leaves. Then recommend one option, with the sums and the risks, and say what would make you change your mind.