"The website should be built using tools and plugins that do not require ongoing licence or subscription fees." That line, or one like it, appears in more and more charity briefs, usually next to "we do not require an ongoing support contract". The instinct behind it is exactly right. The belief underneath it needs pricing, because part of it is true and part of it sends the bill somewhere less visible.
What genuinely can be zero
Licence fees. A WordPress site can be built entirely on free, well-maintained plugins, a hand-built theme with no renewal fee, and no page-builder subscription. This is worth demanding in your brief: every paid plugin a supplier proposes should come with a justification and a named free alternative that was considered. We build this way as standard, and the difference compounds: £300 a year of plugin licences is a volunteer day, every year, forever.
Supplier dependence. "Fully editable by our staff without reliance on the supplier" is achievable and non-negotiable. So is full ownership: admin access, hosting in your name, documentation handed over. If a supplier resists any of that, you are not buying a website; you are renting one. Our website ownership audit sets out what full ownership looks like account by account.
What cannot be zero
Hosting and the domain. Roughly £100 to £180 a year for a small charity site, paid to companies that are not your web supplier. A quote showing zero here means the cost is hidden inside something else, or the site is on someone else's account, which is how ownership problems start.
Attention. This is the one the brief-writers mean to avoid and cannot. A WordPress site needs its software updated, its backups checked, and someone who notices when something stops working. None of that requires a support contract. All of it requires a person.
What deferred attention costs
A story from this summer. We were asked to look at a site whose enquiry form "was not working". The form was fine: submissions were arriving and saving, week after week. What had failed, silently, was the email that told the owner about each one. Nothing looked broken. Nobody was watching. The messages sat unread for weeks, and every one of them was a person who thought they had been ignored.
That is what "no support" actually costs. Unmaintained sites get dramatic hacks too, but the commoner cost is this kind of failure: one that nobody is paid to notice. The cost never appears on an invoice, which is why it feels free.
Three honest ways to cover it
Do it in-house. Free, and genuinely fine for a simple site, if it is a named person's job rather than everyone's hope. The monthly routine: run the updates, check the backup restored, send a test through every form, click the donate button. Twenty minutes. The discipline, not the difficulty, is the cost.
Pay as you go. No retainer; you call someone at an hourly rate when something breaks. Ours is £90 an hour, confirmed in writing before any work. The catch is the word "when": pay-as-you-go is reactive, and the form story above happened on exactly this model. Nobody called, because nobody knew.
A care plan. A monthly fee, from £99 in our case, for updates, security, backups, monitoring and small changes. This is the option briefs rule out, and for a small site with a diligent staff member, ruling it out is reasonable. Just decide it, with eyes open, rather than assume the work does not exist. Our care plans page shows exactly what is covered, so you can compare it against the in-house routine honestly.
What to write in your brief instead
Keep the good instincts, and sharpen the wording. Ask for no licence or subscription fees, with paid plugins justified against free alternatives. Ask for full ownership and admin access at handover. Ask suppliers to state every recurring cost, including hosting and the domain, with the yearly total. And then add the line most briefs miss: name who will do the monthly upkeep, in-house or otherwise, and budget for it. A website with no ongoing costs does not exist. A website with no ongoing surprises is entirely achievable, and it is the better thing to ask for.
If you are writing a brief and want the recurring-costs section sanity-checked, book a free 20-minute call. We will tell you what your site would honestly cost to run each year, including the version where you run it yourselves.
