The monthly cost for the so-called “website maintenance cost” of a website is a common practice among website building agencies. Although in some cases this service is really useful and has a fair value, in many cases it is just an excuse to generate a lot of recurring revenue.
But what is monthly maintenance and what is it for?
Literally, no website needs the “cost of creating and maintaining a website” to stay online, what you need to have a website online are just a domain and a hosting service. Some companies take advantage of the lack of knowledge and use this “service” to practice an abusive and unnecessary monthly fee.
The only case where this service is really needed is when the site needs to be changed frequently and frequently, so you pay a monthly fee for the cost of creating and maintaining a website that is provided on an ongoing basis. Most customers do not pay attention to the detail that they are paying for a service that is not provided, and when requested, they are not attended to with quality or speed.
Managed Sites can resolve this issue
Autonomy and cost reduction should be among the first concerns when hiring a website creation agency. Manageable Sites ensure that you can easily and quickly update the most relevant information about your products or services without the need for an agency or fixed costs.
Despite a higher start-up cost, the investment is often worth the financial and procedural savings of having a company manage changes to your site. Not to mention the fact that agencies accumulate “maintenance” clients and over time the attention they give to your project is less and less, of lower quality and slower.
A cheap website and “reasonable” monthly fees generate giant profits
The strategy of this type of company is to reduce the value of creating the site to levels that are impractical to attract the largest number of customers and, on the other hand, attach monthly values to the service for the so-called “website maintenance cost”.
With a simple account and considering the lowest values in this example, in 12 months, you will have spent $ 2,300. This investment could have been directed to a company with a higher quality service and without abusive monthly costs. In addition to the fact that this monthly cost will be ongoing as long as the site is online. In the end, the “cheap website” ends up being more expensive and you are tied to the company for several years.
Now imagine what 100 customers can generate in monthly profit for this type of company, and in many cases without any kind of service.
Let’s illustrate an ideal scenario and the actual costs
Before hiring a company to develop your website, think about the need and frequency of changes that your project will have, make budgets for manageable websites and compare the cost of monthly maintenance. With a little planning, you can reduce costs and ensure your autonomy.
Considering that the 2 services needed to keep a website online are: Domain and Hosting, any amount above that for the so-called “website maintenance cost” is abusive. Excluding, of course, cases where you are hiring a service that is constantly changing, being well attended, and actually enjoying the service on a recurring basis.
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