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A website costs about $190 to $1,500 a year to run, or $2,844 for a small store. Four renewal-year bills, line by line, with the costs no invoice shows.
Amount due$288 a year
On November 1, 2026 the wholesale price of a .com name rose 71 cents, and on a small business website's yearly bill that change is almost impossible to find.
The bill itself is simple to state. A small business website costs about $190 to $1,500 a year to run in cash, before your own time. A site on a hosted builder sits near $192. WordPress you look after yourself comes to about $288, and the same WordPress site with a paid care plan comes to about $1,488. A small online store with $60,000 in sales runs about $2,844, and $2,040 of that is card fees.
These are renewal-year prices, not sign-up prices. All four bills are in US dollars, before tax, using prices on the providers' own pages or reported from them on November 1, 2026.
Each bill has one .com domain and one business mailbox, so the bills can be compared fairly. The company names show a real price point. They are not recommendations, and a competitor at the same price would give the same total.
A brochure site on a hosted builder. The platform handles hosting, updates and backups.
| Line | Per year |
|---|---|
| Builder planWordPress.com Premium, $8 a month billed yearly | $96 |
| .com domainClose to the $11.17 cost floor; free in year one on many plans | $12 |
| One business mailboxGoogle Workspace Business Starter, $7 a month on a yearly plan | $84 |
| Cash due in a renewal year | $192 |
Free software on rented hosting. You do the updates and check the backups.
| Line | Per year |
|---|---|
| HostingHostinger Premium at its $10.99 a month renewal rate | $131.88 |
| .com domainClose to the $11.17 cost floor; free in year one on many plans | $12 |
| One business mailboxGoogle Workspace Business Starter, $7 a month on a yearly plan | $84 |
| One paid pluginOur assumption: a one-site premium plugin licence at about $5 a month | $60 |
| Cash due in a renewal year | $288 |
The same site, with a company paid to update, back up and fix it.
| Line | Per year |
|---|---|
| HostingHostinger Premium at its $10.99 a month renewal rate | $131.88 |
| .com domainClose to the $11.17 cost floor; free in year one on many plans | $12 |
| One business mailboxGoogle Workspace Business Starter, $7 a month on a yearly plan | $84 |
| One paid pluginOur assumption: a one-site premium plugin licence at about $5 a month | $60 |
| Care plan$100 a month, the low end of Codeable's range for a small business site | $1,200 |
| Cash due in a renewal year | $1,488 |
A shop with 1,000 orders a year at $60 each, so $60,000 in sales.
| Line | Per year |
|---|---|
| Store planShopify Basic, $29 a month billed yearly | $348 |
| .com domainClose to the $11.17 cost floor; free in year one on many plans | $12 |
| One business mailboxGoogle Workspace Business Starter, $7 a month on a yearly plan | $84 |
| Two paid appsOur assumption: $15 a month each | $360 |
| Card fees2.9% + 30 cents per order, so $1,740 + $300 | $2,040 |
| Cash due in a renewal year | $2,844 |
The .com line comes from Verisign's $10.97 wholesale fee plus ICANN's $0.20 per year, which Side by Side Domains works out to a cost floor of $11.17. The 2.9% + 30 cents rate is the standard US online card rate at Stripe, and Shopify Basic is reported at the same rate through Shopify Payments.
The biggest line is different on every bill, and on none of them is it the domain name. On the builder site, half the bill is the platform and 44% is email. Add a care plan and it takes 81% of the bill. On the store, card fees take 72%, and they grow with every sale while everything else stays put.
So the .com rise is worth keeping in proportion: 71 cents is 0.37% of Bill 1 and 0.02% of Bill 4. Verisign can raise the price again, up to 7% a year in four of every six years under its current contract, and it would still not be the line to worry about.
Most comparison pages quote the rate you pay on day one. You budget against the rate you pay after that, and the gap can be four times the headline price.
| Service | Intro rate | Renews at |
|---|---|---|
| Hostinger Premium48-month term, $119.52 paid up front | $2.49/mo | $10.99/mo |
| .com at GoDaddyReported October 30, 2026; three-year purchase required | $0.01 | $22.99/yr |
| Domain bundled with a planWordPress.com, Squarespace and Hostinger all offer this | Free, year 1 | Standard rate |
| ShopifyNew stores, after a 3-day trial | $1/mo, 3 months | $29 to $39/mo |
Take Bill 2. In its first year the cash cost is about $174: $29.88 of hosting, a free domain, $84 of email and $60 for the plugin. At renewal rates the same site costs $288, which is 66% more for nothing new.
Watch the long term. The 48-month hosting deal holds the low rate for four years, which is why it looks painless. Then the next 48 months cost $527.52 instead of $119.52. Put the renewal date in your calendar on the day you buy.
Three costs never arrive on an invoice from your website, and each one can outweigh the lines above.
Updates, broken forms and content changes take time. The hours below are our estimates, not measurements, so put in your own. We priced them at $45 an hour, close to the hourly equivalent of the $92,650 median yearly wage for US web developers.
| Bill | Hours a year | Time | Cash + time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1, builder | 4 | $180 | $372 |
| 2, WordPress, your upkeep | 12 | $540 | $828 |
| 3, WordPress, care plan | 2 | $90 | $1,578 |
| 4, small store | 24 | $1,080 | $3,924 |
The table shows what a care plan really buys. At $100 a month it costs $1,200 and saves about 10 hours, so you pay $120 for each hour you get back. Automated update services start near $39 a month, which is $468 a year, or about $47 an hour if one saved you the same 10 hours. A care plan makes sense when the site earns money and an outage costs more than the plan, not because the hours are cheaper.
Plan prices usually exclude it. Google's pricing page says so outright. If your business cannot reclaim VAT or sales tax, add your local rate to the plan prices above.
A site is rebuilt eventually, so set money aside for it. Divide the cost of the build by the years you expect it to last. A $5,000 site you plan to keep for five years adds $1,000 a year, which is more than Bills 1 and 2 put together.
WordPress.com Premium is $18 billed monthly and $8 billed yearly, so $216 becomes $96.
Hostinger includes two mailboxes per site, free for the first year, so check what they cost at renewal. It suits a one-person business that does not need the rest of a full office suite.
Before each licence renews, ask what breaks without it. If you cannot say, try the site without it.
Cloudflare Registrar says it charges the registry and ICANN price with no markup. That is about $11.17 against the $22.99 reported at GoDaddy. Read what happens when a domain lapses first, and never let a transfer run into your expiry date.
Shopify Basic is reported to add 2% when you use another provider. On $60,000 of sales that is $1,200 a year.
The gap between $527.52 and $119.52 on the plan in Bill 2 is $408 over four years. A month before the term ends, compare your renewal quote with new-customer prices elsewhere, then ask for a better rate or plan a move while you have time to test it.
About $16 for a builder site, $24 for self-run WordPress and $124 with a $100 care plan, once you divide the renewal-year bills by 12. A small store with $60,000 in sales is about $237 a month with card fees and $67 without.
You can publish one for free on a builder's subdomain, but it is not a business address, and free WordPress.com sites show ads to visitors. For your own domain, expect to pay at least the $11.17 cost floor of a .com each year.
Rarely. Let's Encrypt issues certificates for free, and builders and most hosts set them up for you. The real risk is a renewal that fails, as our guide to shorter certificate lifetimes explains.
Yes, WordPress itself is free and open source. You pay for hosting, the domain, and any paid themes or plugins you choose.
It is the only way to fix today's price, and the limit is 10 years on names such as .com. With rises of under a dollar a year, the stronger reason is that you cannot forget a renewal you have already paid.
The lines fail one at a time. A lapsed domain takes the site and email offline, a lapsed host takes the site offline, and a lapsed licence usually stops updates while the site keeps working. Our uptime guide covers what you can claim when a paid host goes down.
Prices were read on November 1, 2026 unless marked. Some pricing pages change by country, and they do not always show US dollars. Where that happened, the US figure comes from a dated report, named below.
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