The five-year bill nobody quotes you

Here is five years of a five-page site, itemised. Nothing about it changed in that time except the copyright year in the footer. Here is where the money went anyway.

None of this is fraud. Every line is a real service someone really performed. The problem is that the site never needed the thing being maintained in the first place.

That is the expensive end. More often it lands nearer $1,340 — hosting, licences and one refresh, with no care plan and no emergencies. That is the good case. It is still $1,340 for a document that did not change.

The care plan is the tell

A care plan exists because the platform requires care. It runs updates, it takes backups, it watches for the plugin that goes unmaintained. That is honest work. It is also work that a folder of HTML files does not generate.

Look at the line again: $2,700 over five years, more than half the bill, and every dollar of it went to keeping the software underneath the brochure from falling over. Not to the brochure. The five pages of text were finished at the start and never touched again.

The form was the only real software on the site

The contact form is usually the one piece of genuine functionality on a site like this. It is a plugin, with a database table, an admin screen, and a history of security advisories. It is also where the emergency invoices tend to come from: it stops sending mail after an update, and nobody notices for a week or two, because nothing looks broken.

Here is the replacement, in full:

<form action="https://formspree.io/f/your-form-id" method="POST">
  <label>Your email
    <input type="email" name="email" required>
  </label>
  <label>Message
    <textarea name="message" rows="5" required></textarea>
  </label>
  <button type="submit">Send</button>
</form>

Nine lines. It cannot stop sending after an update, because there is no update. If the form service ever shuts down, you change one URL in one file. That is the entire migration.

There is a longer write-up of this in a contact form with no database, no plugin, no backend, including what the free tiers actually limit.

The costs that were not on any invoice

Three things cost this business money over five years and never appeared as a line item.

• The lost enquiries while the form was quietly failing. Nobody can tell you what those were worth, which is exactly the problem.
• The login. Two staff have accounts. One leaves. The account is still active three years later, still an administrator. This one I see almost every time.
• The waiting. Every text change goes through whoever holds the admin password. A phone number correction takes days.

None of these are WordPress's fault. They are what happens when a document is stored inside an application. The application has accounts, and accounts have to be managed by someone, and that someone is busy.

Four numbers to ask for

If you are not sure which case you are in, you do not need an audit. You need four lines out of your own records.

• What you pay monthly, to everyone. Hosting, care plan, plugin licences, theme licence. Add them up and multiply by sixty.
• What you have been invoiced outside that over the last five years. The refresh, the emergency, the "we had to update the theme".
• How many times the content actually changed. Not how many times someone logged in — how many times a visitor would have seen something different.
• How many people need to be able to change it. If the answer is more than two and they are not technical, the platform may well be earning its money.

The first two numbers tell you what it costs. The last two tell you whether it is worth it. Most people have never had all four on the same page, which is the only reason a bill like this goes unnoticed for five years.

What replaced it

Five HTML files, one stylesheet, the same photographs. Fourteen kilobytes. It has needed nothing since, because there is nothing in it that can go out of date.

The client can edit it. Not through an admin screen — by opening the file, finding the phone number, and typing a different one. That sounds worse until you remember it took four days the other way.

Where to put a file like that for nothing is its own post. The short version: pick a free static host, point the domain at it, and stop thinking about it.

What the rebuild cost

It would be dishonest to print the first table and leave this one out. Moving off the platform is not free.

Getting the content out, rebuilding five pages, resizing the photographs and pointing the domain is most of a day’s work. Call it $600 at a normal freelance rate. The owner spends an hour on the phone and twenty minutes being shown how to edit a file instead of logging in.

So the honest comparison is $600 once against $5,275 over five years, and the honest caveat is that the $600 buys something with no support contract behind it. If the maths only works because you happen to know someone who does this for a living, that is worth saying out loud. I am saying it.

The figure that decides it is not the $600 anyway. It is the $45 a month that stops.