The question comes up in almost every first conversation: is it better to pay for a website monthly, or buy it once and be done? Since we sell both, we have an obvious interest in the answer going either way. So let’s try it without the sales pitch.
What you actually buy in each case
With a rental you are not buying files, you are buying a service. Somebody builds the site, hosts it, runs the domain, the SSL and the email, and watches that it stays up. Maintenance — updates, security checks and backups — and content changes are separate lines, but they are lines with a known price rather than your problem to solve. Your cost is known in advance and the same every month. When something breaks it isn’t your problem, which sounds like a small thing until it breaks on a Sunday.
With a purchase you buy a product. The site is yours, the code is yours, and once it is finished you can take it wherever you like. A one-off cost, and after that the responsibility is yours: hosting, updates, security, backups, changes.
The key difference is not the price. It is who looks after the site from that day on.
Where renting loses
Let’s take this first, because subscription sellers tend to leave this part out.
- You never stop paying. At 27 €/month that is over 1,600 € across five years. It isn’t a hidden cost, but it is a cost.
- You are tied to one supplier. If you are unhappy with them, you have to move — and moving is always some work.
- You don’t own all of it. The content and the data are yours; the system the site runs on is not.
- On very large projects the subscription can add up to a figure where owning would have been cheaper.
So check two things with any subscription provider, ours included: whether you get an export of your content and data on cancellation, and who owns the domain. The domain should always be registered to your company. If it isn’t, you have a problem you will discover at the worst possible moment.
Where buying loses
Now the other side. A one-off purchase looks cleaner than it is in practice.
- The site isn’t finished when it is published. The system it runs on keeps getting updates. If nobody installs them, after two years the site becomes a security risk.
- Hosting is your cost and your decision. Cheap hosting is often the reason a good-looking site is slow.
- Every change is a new conversation. A new price, a new photograph, a new service description has to be ordered and paid for separately — or you do it yourself, if you know how.
- Backups exist only if somebody makes them. It almost always turns out that nobody does, and it turns out on exactly the day you needed one.
- You depend on one person. A classic we meet regularly: the site was built in 2014 by a nephew who now lives abroad and doesn’t answer email. Nobody knows where the logins are.
A simple rule for deciding
Ask yourself one thing: is there a person in your company who will look after the site — and is that genuinely part of their job?
If you have someone who can install an update, check a backup and swap out some copy, and has the time for it, then buying is often the smarter move. You pay once and you are free.
But if that work is going to land on you between two meetings, or on an employee who already has a job, then the work will not get done. Not through incompetence — because everyone has their own priorities, and “install plugin update” is never in the top five. In that case renting is cheaper, not dearer, because you don’t have to pay for the consequences.
What about the middle route
It exists, and it is often the most sensible one: you already have a site, it worked, nobody just maintains it. In that case there is no need to build a new one. The existing one can be taken over — collect the logins, inventory the content, run a security review and move it onto properly managed infrastructure. With us that takeover is 290 € one-off, after which it runs on a monthly plan from 27 €/month. There is more detail on the website maintenance page.
It is almost always the cheapest route for someone with a decent site and poor management of it.
The numbers, so there is no guessing
With us: renting starts at 27 €/month (KLASIK, up to 9 pages), 47 €/month for a larger site (PREMIUM, up to 15 pages) and 54 €/month (PRESTIGE) if you want to edit the content yourself — all of them include hosting, domain, SSL, email and uptime monitoring. Maintenance is not included — it is a separate service from 49 €/month, as are content changes — and there is no setup fee, because a rental is entered into as a five-year contract. A site you own is a one-off build from 690 €, with the first year of hosting included and then 10 €/month or 100 €/year. Taking over an existing site is 290 € one-off, then a plan from 27 €/month plus maintenance from 49 €/month. It is all collected in the website price list, and the subscription terms — duration, cancellation, export on cancellation — are in the subscription terms.
If after all that you still aren’t sure, that is fair enough, because the answer depends on your company and not on the website. Describe your situation through the contact form or call +386 40 529 425 — we will tell you what we would choose in your position, including when that means buying less from us.