A website with no monthly fees
A no-monthly-fee website is one you pay for once and then stop paying for. There is no monthly charge from us, none for hosting, and no commission on anything you sell through it. Small changes are free. The only recurring cost anywhere is the domain itself, around a dollar a month.
- One payment, then $0 a month to run
- No commission on online orders, ever
- Small changes done free - just email us
- No contract, no retainer, nothing to cancel
The subscription is the product.
Most small-business websites are sold as a monthly plan, and the monthly plan is the point. A restaurant platform at $299 a month costs $17,940 over five years. A WordPress site on a care plan at $120 a month costs $7,200 and still needs rebuilding halfway through. You are not mostly paying for a website in either case - you are paying for software, and for somebody to keep selling it to you.
We charge once, for the work of building the thing, and then stop. Hosting is set up and run as part of the service at no cost to you, small changes are free, and there is no contract to be inside. If that sounds like less of a relationship than a monthly plan, it is - that is the difference you are buying.
What you actually pay, every month, after launch
| Item | Per month | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | $0 | Set up and run as part of the service, with nothing for you to configure or renew. No monthly charge and no usage charge, however busy the site gets. |
| SSL certificate | $0 | Issued and renewed automatically. Nobody should be charging for this in 2026. |
| Your domain | ~$1 | A .com is around $11 a year - about a dollar a month. We can register one for you or point the site at a domain you already have. |
| Contact form | $0 | Enquiries reach your inbox with nothing to subscribe to and no per-message charge, at any volume a local business will ever send. |
| Software updates | $0 | There is no database, no plugins and no admin login, so there is nothing to patch. This is also why the usual break-in routes do not apply - not because the site is magic. |
| Our fee | $0 | We charge once, when we build it, and nothing after that. Small changes - wording, prices, a new photo - we do free. No retainer is required for the site to keep working. |
And the costs we are not going to hide
"$0 a month" is true of the website and false of running a business online, so here is the rest of it. None of it is billed by us, and none of it is a condition of the site working.
| Mailboxes on your domain | $0 to ~$7 per person, per month | Forwarding your domain email to an inbox you already own is free. Proper hosted mailboxes - Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 - are a per-person subscription you buy directly. We set it up either way; we do not resell it. |
|---|---|---|
| Card processing on orders | Your processor’s standard rate | Taking money online costs the same percentage it costs in your card terminal. The difference is that no platform adds a second cut on top of it. |
| Larger changes | Quoted per job | Small edits - wording, prices, swapping a photo - are free and you just email us. A new page, a new section or a new feature is development work, and we quote it as a fixed price before starting. |
| Care plan, if you want one | Optional | Nothing requires one. If you would rather have us on call with agreed response times and a set amount of change work each month, we will quote it. Declining it does not affect the site. |
Work out your own number.
Not ours - yours. Put in what you pay every month today, and this shows you when a one-off build has paid for itself and what you keep after that.
| You pay now | Paid for itself in | You keep over 5 years |
|---|---|---|
| $60/mo | 50 months | $600 |
| $150/mo | 20 months | $6,000 |
| $299/mo | 11 months | $14,940 |
Excludes your domain, about a dollar a month, which you pay your registrar either way. Card processing on orders is unchanged - the saving is the platform cut, not the card fee.
What one payment covers
Six things, none of them monthly.
Not a plan, a tier or a seat. A fixed piece of work, quoted before it starts, and a site that keeps running afterwards without an invoice arriving every month.
- A site built around what you actually sell, not a template
- A page per service, room type or job, each able to rank on its own
- The structured data almost every site in your sector skips
- Ordering or booking that settles into your own payment account
- Hosting, set up and run for you, with nothing monthly to pay
- Small changes - wording, prices, a photo - done free, by email
For comparison
What the recurring options cost.
Published plan ranges, checked on the dates shown. We have not tried to pin these to a single number, because the review sites that quote them contradict each other and the vendors change them.
Restaurant website platforms
$179-$499/mo
BentoBox, Popmenu, Owner.com
Published plan ranges. Several also charge setup, and the ordering module is usually an add-on rather than part of the base plan.
Plus: Often a per-order fee or a percentage on top
Website builders
$16-$99/mo
Wix, Squarespace
Cheap, and genuinely fine for a brochure site. The cost is that you are renting a template and the speed ceiling comes with it.
Plus: More for ecommerce, apps and removing limits
WordPress, maintained properly
$20-$150/mo
Hosting plus a care plan
The hosting is the small part. The recurring cost is somebody keeping the plugins from breaking each other.
Plus: Plugin licences, and a rebuild every few years
Ranges checked 2026-10-31. Confirm the current figure on the vendor's own pricing page before making a decision on it.
Compare us to each of them, name by nameQuestions we get asked
How can hosting genuinely cost nothing per month?
Because a platform charging you monthly is not really charging you for hosting. It is charging you for software - the editor, the templates, the ordering system, the dashboard - and once a site is built to do its job you have stopped needing most of that. We set the hosting up and run it as part of the service, and there is no recurring cost for us to pass on to you.
What is the catch?
Three real ones, and you should weigh them. You pay more up front than a monthly plan asks for in its first year, so if cash this quarter matters more than cost over five, a subscription is the better call. There is no dashboard - you email us for changes instead of editing the site yourself, which is slower if you like doing it at midnight. And we host the site rather than handing you the keys to a server, which is one less thing for you to run and one more thing you are trusting us with.
What happens if you disappear?
The right question, and better asked before you buy than after. Be clear about the arrangement: we build the site and we host and run it, so it lives on our infrastructure rather than yours. That is how most studios that host what they build operate, and it is the trade for having nothing to administer and nothing monthly to pay. If being able to pick the site up and move it elsewhere matters to you, say so on the first call. We would rather tell you straight that this is the wrong fit than find out two years in.
Can I edit the site myself?
No, and we would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise. There is no dashboard and no login. You email us what you want changed and we do it - wording, prices, a new photo, a dish added or removed are all free and usually same day. If you want the site to be something you tinker with yourself at midnight, a website builder genuinely suits you better and we will tell you so on the call.
Is a site like this less capable than a platform?
For a local service business, it is usually more capable, because the pages are built around what you actually sell instead of what fits a template. The honest exception is anything needing a live, logged-in account per customer - a loyalty scheme, a membership area, a booking system with complex inventory. Those want software, and we would tell you so rather than build a worse version of it.
Do you take a percentage of online orders?
No. Orders run through your own site and settle into your own payment account, so the only deduction is your card processor taking their standard rate, exactly as they do on a card machine in the shop. There is no second cut, and no per-order fee to us.
Tell us what you need built.
A short call, a straight answer on scope and cost, and a fixed quote. No retainer, no monthly fee, no commission on your orders.