What a Non-Profit Website Costs Over Five Years

Every website quote answers the wrong question. It tells you what the build costs. It doesn’t tell you what the website costs, which is the build plus five years of keeping it alive. So this is the whole budget, line by line, with my own prices filled in. If I’m going to ask you to plan for five years, I should show the math.

The lines every non-profit website has

Whoever builds your site and wherever it lives, the budget has the same five lines. Some are close to free. One is where most organizations get surprised.

• The domain name. Your address, renewed yearly. About $20 a year, and it should always be registered in your organization’s name, never your designer’s.
• Hosting. The computer the site lives on. I put every client on SiteGround: about $36 for the first year on the introductory price, then about $216 a year. Why, including the renewal price.
• Email. Addresses at your own domain for the whole team. Free for registered non-profits through Google for Nonprofits. The toolkit article walks through applying.
• The build. One time. My flat range is $750 to $2,500 for a complete website, and $500 to $1,500 for repairing a site you already have. Where you land depends on how many kinds of pages you need and whether your text and photos exist yet.
• Care. Monthly, for as long as the site exists. Software updates that get tested, backups that get restored once to prove they work, content changes, and a person who answers. Mine are $95, $149, or $249 a month, and paying for a year gets one month free. This is the line most quotes leave out.

Three organizations, five years

Three typical shapes of client, priced with the lines above. The build cost sits in the middle of the range for each, hosting uses SiteGround’s first-year and renewal prices, and the domain is $20 a year. Care is billed monthly; pay yearly and take one month off each year.

Read the bottom line first. A small organization’s complete web presence, built properly and looked after for five years, costs about what a modest phone bill costs. The typical organization pays roughly two hundred a month for a site that’s current and backed up. Take that number to your board rather than the build quote.

Where the money goes

In every column, the build is the smaller number and care is the larger one. Over five years, roughly three quarters of what you spend on a website is spent after launch. That’s the opposite of how most organizations budget, which is why so many sites look wonderful in year one and abandoned by year three. The build got funded and the care didn’t.

It’s also why I’d rather a client spend less on the build and commit to the care than the other way around. A modest site that’s kept current beats a beautiful one nobody has touched since the gala.

What if a volunteer builds it on Wix or Squarespace?

Cheaper in cash, if it goes well. Their plans run $200 to $600 a year including hosting, so five years is $1,000 to $3,000 with no build cost and no care cost, because the volunteer is the build and the care. For a tiny organization with a patient, reliable volunteer, it can be the right call.

Two things are missing from that number. The first is the volunteer’s time, which is free until the volunteer moves, gets busy, or gets tired, at which point the site freezes on whatever it said that day. The second is ownership: you’re renting, and the rent never ends and never gets cheaper. The WordPress column above includes a person who’s paid to keep the site alive and an organization that owns every piece of it.

Five ways to bring the total down

• Arrive with your content. Text and photos that exist move a project toward the bottom of the build range. Writing everything from scratch moves it toward the top.
• Repair before you rebuild. If your current site still says true things, a $500 to $1,500 repair often does what a $2,500 rebuild would, for the same five years afterward.
• Pay for care yearly. One month free each year is about eight percent off the largest line in the table.
• If you’re a Rhode Island or Massachusetts non-profit, start now. New websites currently include the Community plan free for the first twelve months, which takes $1,140 off the biggest line. The terms are on the pricing page.
• Claim the free things. Google for Nonprofits alone replaces what many small organizations pay for email, and the toolkit lists the rest.

What I wouldn’t do to save money: skip the backups, leave a plugin unpatched, or register the domain in a volunteer’s personal account. Those savings all come due at once, on the worst possible day.

Questions people ask right after this one

Is the care plan necessary if nothing changes on the site? The software underneath changes whether your content does or not. Updates, backups, and someone watching are the plan; content changes are the bonus.

Can we start with a smaller plan and move up? Yes, and down again. The plan should match how much the site changes, and that changes with your seasons.

Do these prices go up? My rates are grandfathered: the price you start at is the price you keep. Hosting renewals are set by the host and I state them in advance, as above.

What about taking donations online? That’s its own budget line with its own fees, and it deserves its own article. It doesn’t have to be expensive, and you shouldn’t let a website quote bundle it in vaguely.

Want this table filled in for your organization instead of a typical one? Tell me about your project and you’ll get one flat number for the build and a recommendation for the care, in writing, before anything starts. Every figure above is also on the pricing page, so you can check my math any time.