Why Are You Paying Monthly for a Website That Never Changes?
Last week a client asked me to look at her website bill. $29 a month, Wix, the Core plan. She had not touched the site since March. Five pages: menu, hours, phone number, about, contact. The bill had arrived 38 times for a website that changes less often than her voicemail greeting.
She is not the exception. She is the median. The common small business plans now sit at $29 a month: Wix Core and Squarespace Core both landed there after Squarespace's mid-2026 price increase, per Fuzen's July comparison. GoDaddy's builder starts at $9.99 a month, but that is an introductory term. The renewal lands at $12.99, and its managed WordPress jumps from $6.99 introductory to $22.95 on renewal. Intro pricing lasts one term. After that, the renewal price is the real one.
The $29 buys hosting for five static pages. Pages that do not change. Hosting for unchanging files is nearly free at any scale: Cloudflare Pages serves unlimited static requests and unlimited bandwidth on its free tier, with free SSL and no card required. Netlify keeps a free tier around 30GB of bandwidth a month. GitHub Pages hosts free with a 100GB monthly cap. The only bill a static five-page site needs is the domain: $10 to $20 a year.
Run it to five years. A Squarespace Core plan with a couple of add-ons costs roughly $4,960 to $6,460 over five years, and nothing is transferable: leave and you rebuild. A custom static site costs $2,050 to $4,050 over the same five years, and the owner keeps the code. That gap is not a hosting difference. It is a rent-versus-own difference.
The meter never stops
The worst version I saw this month came from r/smallbusiness: a founder whose uncle pays $379 a month for a "custom booking system" that is mostly an embedded widget, and the vendor wanted $2,400 to add a dropdown to it. His line stays with me: paying custom-system prices for hosting, automated reports, and an iframe that belongs to someone else.
There is a pattern in what owners ask. "Why do ecommerce platforms charge monthly fees before you have made a single sale?" Twenty, thirty, forty dollars a month from the day you sign up. "What is the simplest way to build a basic website without ongoing costs?" Every answer points at Wix, Squarespace, or Webflow, and every one of them runs a meter. The top comment on that thread said the quiet part plainly: a static site on Cloudflare Pages costs nothing to host, paired with a free headless CMS for the rare update.
What the five pages actually need
A business site is five things: home, about, services, contact with a form, and testimonials or pricing. A small-business owner on r/smallbusiness put it plainer: owners need menu, services, hours, location, phone. None of that changes weekly. Most of it changes never.
This is why I build static and charge once. A one-time build, a $15 domain renewal, and the meter stops. No monthly platform fee, no renewal surprises, no vendor who can hold the site hostage when you want to leave. The bill my client got for 38 months of nothing would have covered the build outright, twice over.
$29 a month is $348 a year. Times five years, that is $1,740 for files that never change, served for free by a company that asks nothing.
Sources
- Several.com: GoDaddy builder intro vs renewal pricing
- Cybernews: GoDaddy builder pricing review
- Dev.to: Cloudflare Pages free tier limits and pricing, 2026
- Forged Digital Design: five-year Squarespace/Wix lock-in math (agency-authored, directional)
- Toolchase: Netlify credit-model pricing vs Vercel vs Cloudflare