> answers/cost
How much does a website cost per month?
UPDATED OCTOBER 30, 2026
Once a website is built, keeping it online costs a few dollars a month: a domain name (around $10 to $20 a year) and hosting, which for a modern static site is often free or a few dollars at cost. Everything above that is a service, not a necessity. Ghost's optional care plan is $190 a month and covers hosting, uptime monitoring, backups, updates and a monthly allowance of content changes, with a person who answers.
The recurring lines, honestly
- Domain: yours, renewed yearly, in your own registrar account.
- Hosting: at cost. A fast static site on a modern host is cheap or free.
- Email: if you want name@yourdomain, a few dollars per mailbox per month.
- CMS: the headless CMS we use has a free tier that covers most small sites.
- Care plan: optional. Monitoring, backups, changes, a human.
What you should not be paying monthly
A fee simply to keep a site you already paid for online, plugin licences the site cannot function without, or a platform subscription that holds your content hostage. If a monthly bill does not buy you monitoring, backups, changes or support, ask what it is for.
> faq
Related questions
- Does Ghost charge monthly to keep the site online?
- No. The site is yours; hosting and domain are in your name at cost. The care plan is optional and can be stopped with a month's notice.
- What does website maintenance cost?
- On a modern stack there is very little to maintain: no plugins to update, no security patches to chase. The care plan's $190 is mostly for monitoring, backups and the monthly changes you ask for.
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Where to go from here
> open_channel.exe
Tell us what you need. Any budget.
Say what you have in mind and what you can spend. You get back what we would build for it, how long it takes and a fixed price, usually within one business day.
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