The five-year total cost of a $500 website

Only the top half of this is addable. The bottom half is where the decision actually lives, and it is why cheaper is the wrong word rather than the wrong number.

The build: $500, against $6,000 to $14,000 at $300 to $400 per page. Hosting and domain over five years: the same either way. A rebuild inside five years: often once, against the thing you are buying instead. Measurement: none, so the next decision is also blind, against call tracking, Search Console and exports.

The rebuild is the honest line item. A five-page template built once and never maintained accumulates three things: dependencies that have aged into known vulnerabilities — OWASP lists Vulnerable and Outdated Components as a category in its own right — field performance drifting against published thresholds, and content that answers fewer questions than the market now asks.

What we will not do is total the third column for you. The lost-leads figure depends on your average job, your margin and your close rate. Anyone quoting you a five-year ROI for a cheap site has supplied those numbers on your behalf.

Three cases, and they are real. You are testing whether the service sells at all — a one-page site and a phone number is a reasonable instrument for that, and spending $10,000 to find out is worse. The business does not depend on search: referral-only trades with full books do not need twenty-five pages. Or you will replace it on a known date, which is a plan; the failure mode is the stopgap that becomes permanent because nothing forced the decision.

Outside those three, the $500 site is cheaper for about eighteen months and then stops being cheaper, and the switch is invisible because the cost arrives as absence rather than as an invoice.