Budgeting for the Year After Launch

The budget that ends at the wrong point

A project is approved, built, and launched, and the money allocated to it is spent.

The following Monday the site starts costing money in ways nobody planned: hosting renews, a licence expires, a price needs changing, and somebody asks for a page that was not in the original scope.

Each is small and none was budgeted, so each becomes a negotiation, and the cumulative effect is a site that quietly stops being maintained because there is no line for it.

Which is how a site that was current in September looks abandoned eighteen months later.

What actually recurs

• Hosting and the domain, annually or monthly.
• Platform, theme and plugin licences.
• Third-party services: forms, booking, chat, email.
• Maintenance: updates, backups, monitoring.
• Changes: prices, staff, services, seasonal content.
• Content and photography, to keep it from ageing.
• A contingency for something breaking.

The first three are invoices that arrive whether you plan for them or not. The next three only happen if somebody has time and money allocated, which is why they are the ones that stop.

A working figure

As a starting point, plan on somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the build cost per year.

Toward the lower end for a simple brochure site on standard hosting with few moving parts.

Toward the upper end for anything with a shop, a booking system, integrations, or several paid components.

That figure is not a rule and it produces a sensible number to argue with, which is more useful than the usual approach of having no figure at all.

Ask any supplier quoting a build to give you the expected annual running cost alongside it. Most will, and the ones who cannot are telling you they have not thought about it.

Licences are the surprise

The category that catches people, because it is invisible until it lapses.

A theme, a page builder, a form plugin, a booking tool, and a font may each carry an annual fee, and several may be on the supplier's account rather than yours.

When one lapses, the component usually keeps working and stops receiving updates, which is a security problem developing quietly rather than a visible failure.

Ask for a list at handover: every paid component, its annual cost, its renewal date, and whose name it is in.

That list is the running-cost budget for the technical half, and it takes a supplier ten minutes to produce while they still remember.

Budget for changes, not just fixes

The distinction that determines whether the site stays current.

Maintenance keeps a site working. It does not keep it accurate.

Prices change, staff arrive and leave, services are added, a supplier relationship ends, opening hours shift, and a photograph becomes three years old.

None of that is a fault and all of it needs somebody's time.

A small allocation for changes, whether hours in a retainer or a modest annual figure, is what prevents the pattern where a business knows six things on the site are wrong and none of them get corrected because each individually is not worth raising.

A worked example

A firm launched a site and budgeted nothing beyond the build.

Over the first year they paid for hosting, two licence renewals they had not known about, an urgent fix when a plugin update broke the contact form, and a developer's time to add two pages.

Each was approved individually as an unexpected cost, and each felt like the supplier finding new things to charge for.

Totalled at the year end it came to roughly fifteen percent of the build, which was entirely reasonable and had felt like a series of impositions because none of it had been anticipated.

For the second year they set a line in the budget at that figure and moved the maintenance items into a small retainer.

The spending was almost identical and the relationship was completely different.

Who does the small changes

A decision worth making deliberately rather than by default.

Internally is cheaper per change and requires somebody trained, with time, who will still be here next year.

Externally costs more per change and always happens, which is the relevant difference.

The common failure is intending to do it internally, training nobody, and finding a year later that nothing has been updated because the person who could do it is busy.

Decide which, and if internally, name the person and put an hour in their month rather than assuming it will fit.

The photography line

Worth calling out separately because it is the item that ages a site fastest and is never in a budget.

Photographs of your own work are the strongest content a small business has, and they date visibly: a vehicle in old livery, a member of staff who left, a shopfront since repainted.

A modest annual allocation, or a routine of photographing finished work on a phone with somebody named as responsible, keeps that current at almost no cost.

A business that budgets for a photography day every second or third year is unusual and its site looks it.

The counter-case

Not every site needs an ongoing budget.

A small brochure site on a simple platform, for a business whose services and prices do not change, may genuinely need hosting and nothing else for years, and inventing a retainer for it is a cost with no return.

There is also a risk in over-planning: allocating a substantial annual figure to a site that produces few enquiries is spending on the wrong thing, and the honest answer may be to spend less on the site and more on being found.

The test is whether the site is doing commercial work. If it is, keeping it current is cheap relative to what it produces. If it is not, the running-cost question is secondary to a larger one.

What to plan

1. Get the annual running cost from the supplier at quote stage.
2. Ask for a licence list with renewal dates at handover.
3. Set a line at ten to twenty percent of the build.
4. Separate maintenance from changes in that figure.
5. Name who makes small changes, and give them the hour.
6. Include a photography allocation.
7. Review it at twelve months against what was actually spent.

Step one takes a sentence in an email and turns a year of unexpected invoices into a budgeted line.

What a retainer should cover is in what a retainer should include.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.