What a website actually costs per month, line by line
Most answers give you a hosting price and stop. A real monthly bill has eight lines on it, two of them are usually forgotten, and the first year is a marketing number. Here is the whole list, and how to price the second year before you buy the first.
"How much does a website cost per month" has a bad answer everywhere, and the reason is that the honest answer is a list rather than a number. Most articles give you a hosting price, because that is the line with an affiliate link attached to it.
Here is the whole list. Our own prices in it are read from our live pricing at the time of writing; the third-party figures are widely reported ranges as of September 2026, and you should check them against the actual sign-up page before believing anybody, including me.
The eight lines
A few of those deserve a sentence.
SSL is free and automatic now. It was not always, and there are still places that will sell you one. There is no version of a small business website in 2026 that needs a paid certificate.
Email on your domain is almost never included. This is the single most common surprise. You buy a domain and a site, you assume hello@yourbusiness.com comes with it, and it does not — it is a separate service at roughly a dollar or two per mailbox per month. Budget it on day one, because the alternative is putting a Gmail address on a business card you already printed.
The AI is metered nearly everywhere. If a builder has an AI feature, it either has a credit balance or a plan tier gating it. "Free AI" usually means a small monthly allowance, which is fine — it just is not unlimited, and running out mid-project is a worse discovery than knowing the number.
Somebody's time is the largest line. Nobody invoices it, so nobody counts it, and it is routinely ten times the software cost. This is the real argument for paying more for a tool that is faster to use, and the real argument against a tool that is cheap and fights you.
Year two is the real number
Almost every price you see when you sign up is an introductory price, and the pattern is consistent enough to plan around.
A .com is commonly $8 to $15 for the first year and $12 to $18 to renew. Shared hosting is widely reported at $2 to $15 a month to start and $10 to $40 once the introductory term ends. Some registrars go further and sell year one for under a dollar against a renewal in the twenties.
None of that is a scam. It is how the industry prices, and it is disclosed. The mistake is budgeting from the first number and being surprised by the second one twelve months later, usually alongside every plugin licence renewing in the same week.
So price the second year before you buy the first. It takes one extra click on any sign-up page, and it is the single most useful thing in this article.
What we charge, since it would be strange not to say
Our free tier is $0 a month and includes unlimited projects and unlimited publishing and hosting — the site is live, on our hosting, without a card. What the free tier does not include is the paid AI models; there is a monthly credit allowance on the free ones.
Paid plans start at $9 a month, and what you are buying is the AI rather than the website: more credits, and the agent running on the better models. $24 and $49 tiers exist for people building regularly and for heavy AI use.
That structure is deliberate and it is worth explaining, because it is unusual. Hosting a static page costs us very little, so charging for it would be charging for the cheap part. Running a reasoning model over a page costs real money per call, so that is the part that is metered. Which model answers which call, and why most of a page does not need the expensive one, is the whole reason the number can be $9 instead of $40.
You will still have a domain to pay for, and email if you want it on your own name. Nobody escapes those two.
The free tier is $0 a month, hosting included. Unlimited projects, unlimited publishing and hosting. Paid plans start at $9, for the AI. See the plans.
The four questions that price any builder properly
Whatever you end up using, these four get you a real number instead of a headline one:
- What does this cost in month thirteen? Ask it in exactly those words.
- Is email included, and for how many addresses? If the answer is vague, it is not included.
- What happens when the AI allowance runs out? Does the feature stop, or does the bill keep going?
- What do I pay to take the site somewhere else? Not whether you can — what it costs in money and in hours. The answer varies more than people expect.
The useful thing to take from this
A small business website is genuinely cheap to run now — realistically a few dollars a month plus a domain, if you choose carefully and read the renewal price. It is also almost never as cheap as the advertised figure, and the gap is made of the two or three lines nobody mentions.
The number to put in a budget is the second year, with email in it. If that number is still fine, you have chosen well.