Launch day gets treated as the end of the project, and it isn't. The invoice clears, the old site redirects, somebody posts about it on LinkedIn, and everyone goes back to their actual job. What follows is eighteen months of quiet, low-grade ownership that almost nobody costs out at the pitch. This piece is about what that period contains and what a fair price for it looks like.
The first month after go live
The four to six weeks after a site goes live are the busiest part of the job, and they rarely appear on anyone's schedule. Real visitors arrive within hours, on the pages you tested least. A form that worked in staging stops delivering because your IT provider tightened the mail rules, and someone in sales finds a price that was wrong on the old site too.
We build two weeks of post-launch attention into every project and say so in the proposal, because that fortnight is when fixes are cheapest and the people who built the site still have the whole thing in their heads. Six months later the same change takes twice as long, and we charge accordingly.
Ask any studio you're talking to what happens in weeks one to four after go-live, and whether it's included. If nobody can answer clearly, assume it isn't. On a $20,000 project you should expect defect fixes at no extra cost for at least thirty days, with a written definition of what counts as a defect rather than a new request.
Hosting, and what you are paying for
Hosting is the running cost people misjudge in both directions, and the right figure depends on what the site does. A brochure site for a bakery sits happily on a $20 a month plan. A few hundred pages with an events calendar and a search function wants closer to $60 to $150. Anyone quoting $5 a month is selling shared hosting that will be slow at the worst moment.
That bill covers a server, a content delivery network so the site loads quickly outside your own city, an SSL certificate, and a staging copy where changes are tested before they reach the live site. It should also cover somebody noticing when the server falls over at three in the morning, which is the part cheap hosting leaves out.
Keep the domain name in your own company account, registered to the company, renewing on a card that won't expire. We have been called in more than once by a business whose site vanished because a domain lapsed on a former employee's personal credit card. Recovering it is possible and expensive, and preventing it costs about fifteen dollars a year and a calendar reminder.
Software updates and how often they need doing
If your site runs on WordPress, Craft, Shopify or anything with a database behind it, the software underneath changes constantly, in the form of core updates, plugin updates, PHP version changes and payment gateway deprecations. None of it makes the site better for your customers, and all of it has to happen anyway, because the alternative is a site that eventually breaks or gets compromised.
For most businesses monthly is the right rhythm, which means updates going on a staging copy first, someone checking that the forms still submit and the checkout still takes money, then the same updates going on the live site. On a normal business site that is an hour or two of an experienced person's time each month. Leave it a year and thirty updates land at once.
Static sites, which we now build for a lot of clients, change this picture. Pages are built in advance and served as plain files, so there is no database sitting there to be attacked and far less to patch. Content is still edited through a proper editor. The trade is less flexibility in places, worth discussing before the build rather than after.
Backups and the day something breaks
Backups need to be automatic and stored somewhere other than the server they came from, and they need to be restorable, which is where most arrangements quietly fail. Once a year, ask whoever holds your backups to restore last night's copy onto a test address and send you the link. If that takes more than a day, you have found the problem early.
Most of what keeps a small business site secure is housekeeping: two factor authentication on the admin logins, accounts removed when people leave, a written note of who holds which login, and no plugins sitting there because an agency recommended them in 2019. Sites like yours are rarely targeted by a person, but found by a script scanning for a known hole in an old version of something.
Agree in advance who is responsible if the site is compromised. On our support arrangements a compromise is an emergency, so the site comes offline, gets restored from a clean backup, and goes back up only once we have found the way in. That work is included, and for sites we did not build we will still help, hourly, though it takes longer.
Small changes and who makes them
Most of what you will want after launch is small: a new team member's photo, a menu change, a job posting, a paragraph that reads badly now you have seen it on a real screen. There will be a dozen or so a year. The work in each is minutes, and the cost sits in the asking and the waiting, which is why the arrangement matters more than the hourly rate.
There are a few workable ways to handle this, and you should pick one deliberately: training someone internally and giving them an editor they cannot break, buying a block of studio hours every month, or paying per change and accepting that small jobs queue behind big ones. Brainstorm, our Irish practice, established in 2010, sets out how these support arrangements work week to week.
Training someone internally usually gives the best value, and it is also the option most often abandoned, because it depends on one named person owning the site as part of their job, with a couple of hours a month set aside. Left to whoever has a free afternoon, it stops happening within a quarter. Name the person in the project plan and train them during the build.
What a support arrangement should cost
A support arrangement worth paying for spells out the hosting and what happens when it fails, how often updates are applied, how backups are taken and tested, how much change work is included, and how quickly somebody replies when you email. That last one matters more to most clients than anything else on the list, and it is the item proposals are vaguest about. Ours is one working day.
Budget somewhere between $150 and $500 a month for a normal business site, depending on size, platform and how much change work is included, with bookings or payments sitting higher. If you plan to publish regularly, the harder question is who writes the words, and how that gets planned and resourced is worth reading before you commit to a monthly newsletter you will abandon in March.
Be wary of support priced as a percentage of the build, and of any setup that ties your domain, hosting and code together so tightly you cannot leave. You should be able to ask for a copy of your site files and database and have them within a week. We put that in writing, and you can ask whoever you hire to do the same.
There are two things you can do this afternoon without hiring anyone. Write down every account the site depends on, the registrar, host, email, analytics, payment gateway and plugin licences, noting who owns each login and whose card pays for it. Then list the ten changes you are most likely to want next year, and ask any studio to price against that list rather than a generic monthly figure.