£49 a month, or £600 once? The three-year sum

Two tradesmen buy a website on the same Monday. One pays nothing upfront and £49 a month. The other pays £600 and then £20 a month. For the next twenty months the first one is ahead, and he knows it, because the difference is sitting in his account. In month 21 they draw level. Everything after that, the gap runs the other way and never comes back.

Neither of them did anything wrong. They answered different questions: one asked what it costs this month, the other asked what it costs by the time the van needs replacing. Here is the arithmetic on both, using prices UK companies actually publish.

The three-year sum, on real published prices

Over 36 months a £49 monthly plan totals £1,764 and a £39 plan totals £1,404, against £1,320 for a £600 build with a £20 a month care plan.

Stretch it to five years and the shape gets starker: £2,940 on a £49 plan, £2,340 on a £39 plan, £1,800 on the build plus care. Five years is not an ambitious life for a trade website. Plenty of the ones I look after are older than that and still doing the job.

The reason five years is the fairer window is that a trade website does not go out of date the way people assume. The services do not change, the town does not move, and the photos improve rather than expire. What dates is the design, and a tidy, fast, honest page ages far more slowly than a fashionable one. Most of the rebuilds I get asked for are wanted rather than needed.

Where the monthly plan genuinely wins

Paying monthly is the better decision when cash today matters more than cash in two years, and when you are testing something rather than committing to it.

If you started the business this year and every outgoing is counted, £600 in one lump is a real obstacle. £39 a month is not. Take the monthly plan. The crossover is nearly two years out and a business that does not reach month 21 does not care what happens at month 21. That is a straight answer that costs me work, and it is still the right one.

The second case is testing. A new service line, a second town, a trade you are moving into. Renting the website for a year to find out whether the work is there is exactly the right order to do things in. Build the asset once you know the answer, not before. I have talked two people out of a build on that basis and would again.

What actually happens at month 21

Almost nobody notices the crossover when it arrives, because a direct debit that has not changed does not announce itself.

This is the practical weakness of the monthly model, and it has nothing to do with the price being unfair. £49 leaves the account on the same date it has left for twenty months. There is no invoice to read, no decision to make, and no moment where anyone asks whether this is still the right arrangement. The crossover passes in silence.

The one-off route forces the opposite behaviour. You paid a visible amount, you remember paying it, and the £20 that follows is small enough to be obviously maintenance rather than rent. Neither is more honest than the other, but one of them keeps you paying attention and the other is designed not to.

If you are on a monthly plan, the fix is a calendar reminder at eighteen months that says nothing more than "check the website deal". Five minutes, once, and the decision becomes deliberate again.

The assumption the sums quietly depend on

A one-off build price cannot be changed after you have paid it, while a rolling monthly fee can be repriced with notice, which makes the three-year monthly total an estimate rather than a figure.

Every subscription in Britain has gone up in the last three years. Streaming, insurance, broadband, the lot. There is no particular reason website plans are exempt, and a rolling contract is designed to allow it. So £1,764 is the optimistic version of the monthly number, not the pessimistic one.

The £600 cannot move, because it is already paid. The £20 could, in principle, though it buys hosting and maintenance rather than the site itself, so the exposure is a fraction of the size. Worth asking any provider directly: what notice do you give on a price change, and has the current price moved in the last two years?

What the arithmetic looks like from the seller's side

A monthly plan is worth more to the provider than a one-off build, which is why so many UK companies have moved to it, and that is a reason to read it carefully rather than a reason to avoid it.

Worth saying out loud, since I sell one of these models. A customer on £49 a month is worth £1,764 over three years and keeps paying after that. A customer who pays £600 is worth £600 plus whatever the care plan brings. If you were designing a business to maximise revenue per customer, you would build the monthly one, and most people have.

That does not make it a con. Predictable revenue lets a provider keep supporting a site properly instead of chasing the next build, which is genuinely better for the customer than a one-off fee and silence afterwards. But it does explain why the monthly model is pitched harder, and why the ownership question tends to be the last thing mentioned rather than the first.

The honest summary is that both models are fine and both are sold by people with an interest. Read the terms, do the sum over the life you expect, and pick on that rather than on how the offer is framed.

What the money is actually buying in each case

The monthly fee buys access to a website, while the one-off fee buys the website itself, and that distinction only becomes visible on the day you want to leave.

This is the part the arithmetic misses. At month 36 the monthly customer has paid £1,764 and owns nothing in particular. The one-off customer has paid £1,320 and owns a site, a domain and a set of files that work anywhere. If both stop paying tomorrow, one has a website and one has a redirect.

Some providers close that gap by handing over files after a minimum term, which is a reasonable arrangement fairly described. Others do not say. Either way the question belongs in the comparison, and it is set out across seven UK companies in trade website companies compared.

The number that makes all of this small

The gap between the cheapest and dearest option over three years is about £444, which is less than most UK trades earn from a single decent job.

Worth keeping perspective. £444 over three years is £12 a month. If choosing the wrong one costs you £12 a month and choosing a website that does not bring in work costs you a job a quarter, you have been optimising the wrong variable the entire time. Cost per job across every trade lead channel puts that in proportion: the website decision that matters is whether it produces enquiries, not which way you pay for it.

The one exception is the provider who disappears. A site nobody is maintaining costs the same every month and returns nothing, which is the genuinely expensive outcome and more common than people think. That failure mode is covered in what to do when your web designer stops replying.

See it before you decide either way

I build the mockup first. Free, of your actual business, before any money changes hands, so the decision is about something real rather than a price list. If you want it, £600 to build, split £300 to start and £300 on final approval, then £20 a month for hosting, SSL, security, domain renewal and unlimited small edits. Rolling, cancel any time, yours from launch. See what a tradesman website costs or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.