Website Maintenance Cost: What a B2B Software Site Really Needs

Website maintenance is the recurring cost of keeping a site working, fast, indexable and current after the build is signed off, and it is a different budget from the one that paid for the build. This guide is written for a founder or marketing lead at a seed-stage or Series B software business who has just commissioned a site and is now being asked for a number that repeats every month. The four page-one guides I read in full while writing this were published by three hosting companies and a site builder, and all four price a kind of site that mostly sits still. Below: the figures those four actually publish, a line-by-line operating model for a software marketing site, and a rule for choosing between a retainer, hourly work and hiring.

The short version

• The costliest lines are not monthly. On a software marketing site the big ones are event-triggered: a framework major release, a pricing rewrite, a funding announcement, a rebrand.
• I read four of the page-one guides in full on 16 September 2026. Network Solutions, Hostinger, Wix and Rocket.net price personal sites, blogs, small and medium businesses, corporate sites, e-commerce stores and government sites. None of those four prices a software product company's marketing site.
• Hosting is not maintenance. Hostinger puts web hosting at $2 to over $300 per month and professional maintenance at $200 to $4,500 per month. Buying the first does not buy the second.
• Three tiers make the number arguable: keep the lights on, keep it fast and indexable, keep it shipping. The middle tier is the one none of those four guides itemizes, and the one that decides whether the site still works next year.
• Retainer, hourly or in-house is a question about how often the site changes, not about how much you can spend.

What does website maintenance cost?

Anywhere from $5 to over $5,000 a month across the four page-one guides I read on 16 September 2026, which is a spread of three orders of magnitude and useless until you know which of three jobs you are buying. The figures below are each publisher's own, read directly from their pages on 16 September 2026. They are not GrowthHasten prices, and this article does not publish one.

Source (read 16 Sep 2026)	The monthly figure it publishes	The site types it prices
Network Solutions	"The average monthly website maintenance costs range from $35 to over $5,000." Its own package tiers: $15 to $100 basic, $100 to $500 standard, $500 to $5,000+ premium or custom	Personal blog, small business, medium business or SMB, e-commerce, enterprise or custom
Hostinger	$200 to $4,500 for professional maintenance; under $100 per month doing it yourself	Personal, professional blog, small to medium business, multimedia entertainment, corporate, e-commerce
Wix	$5 for a personal site with limited content up to thousands for a large enterprise site; $200 to $2,000 for a corporate site	Personal blog, professional blog, corporate, e-commerce, government
Rocket.net	$20 to $5,000 per month, or $300 to $60,000 on an annual contract. Its by-type table runs $100 to $200 personal, $500 to $1,000 small business, $1,000 to $4,500 corporate	Personal, small business, corporate, e-commerce, enterprise WordPress

Read the third column rather than the second. Every one of those guides is internally consistent and carefully assembled. They are also all pricing a site whose content changes and whose platform does not, which is a reasonable description of a restaurant site and a poor description of a marketing site that ships alongside a software product.

The guide to what a website costs to build splits the recurring bill in two: the upkeep, and the further development. That split is right as far as it goes. This article opens the space between the two halves, because on a software marketing site that space holds most of the real work and most of the real risk.

Why do the published ranges not fit a software company?

Because all four price content churn, and a software marketing site's cost is driven by code churn. The guides assume the thing under the content stays where you left it. On a site built on a modern framework with a headless CMS, the thing under the content has a version number, a dependency tree and a support window.

That difference is measurable rather than rhetorical. Across the four guides I read in full, the words "Core Web Vitals", "dependency", "framework", "redirect" and "structured data" appear zero times in the article bodies. Not rarely. Zero.

Those are five of the lines that a software marketing site pays for every quarter, and none of the four names them at all.

This is not a criticism of the publishers. A hosting company writing for a small business is answering the question its readers ask. It does mean that a page-one range dropped into a budget for a site running on Next.js with a separate content layer is a template drawn for a different building.

Is website maintenance the same as hosting?

No. Hosting is one line inside maintenance, and on Hostinger's own figures it is one of the smaller ones: it puts web hosting between $2 and over $300 per month, then puts professional maintenance at $200 to $4,500 per month as a separate figure in the same guide.

Managed hosting genuinely absorbs a chunk of the work: the operating system, the web server, TLS renewal, platform-level patching and often backups. What it does not touch is your application. Your dependencies, your framework version, your rendering behavior, your redirects, your schema and your tag setup all live above the line a host is responsible for.

The test to apply: ask your host, in writing, whether a critical advisory in one of your npm dependencies is their problem or yours. Whatever the answer is on your plan, that one question is the cleanest way to find where the hosting bill actually stops.

What is actually in a maintenance bill?

Sixteen lines, in three tiers, each behaving differently. The tier tells you whether the line is optional. The behavior column tells you whether it belongs in a monthly figure at all, because a line that fires only when something specific happens belongs in a named allowance, not in an average smeared across twelve months.

Tier 1. Keep the lights on: the site stays up, reachable and recoverable. Letting any of the first four lapse can take the site offline rather than merely degrade it. The last two do not keep it up at all: they are what lets you notice when it goes down, and get it back.

Line item	Cost behavior	What moves it
Hosting and CDN	Fixed, with a variable edge	Traffic, regions served, build minutes on a platform that meters them
Domain renewal	Fixed, annual	The renewal price, which is usually higher than the first year. Hostinger puts renewals at roughly $10 to $129 per year depending on the extension
TLS certificate	Usually $0	Hostinger notes that most reputable hosts include a free certificate, and that paid certificates can run up to $1,000 a year where one is genuinely required
CMS or content platform plan	Fixed, with step changes	Editor seats, document or record counts, API request volume. It steps rather than slopes
Uptime and error monitoring	Fixed	Number of checks and retention. Cheap, and the only reason you hear about an outage before a customer does
Backups and restore testing	Fixed	The backup is cheap. The restore test is the part that gets skipped, and an untested backup is a belief rather than a backup

Tier 2. Keep it fast and indexable: the tier none of those four guides itemizes, and the one that separates a software marketing site from a brochure site. Almost none of it is monthly.

Line item	Cost behavior	What moves it
Dependency and security patching	Variable	Upstream advisories, which arrive on nobody's schedule. Cheap if done continuously, expensive if batched
Runtime and framework major upgrades	Event-triggered, on a published calendar	The upstream release cycle. Node.js documents that an LTS release "typically guarantees that critical bugs will be fixed for a total of 30 months" and that production applications should only run Active or Maintenance LTS
Core Web Vitals regression after feature work	Event-triggered by every release	New scripts, embeds, fonts, images and third-party tags. The metric set itself also moves, which the next section covers
Structured data maintenance	Event-triggered by page-type change	A new template, a changed pricing model, a renamed product. Schema silently describes the old page until someone updates it
Redirect map upkeep	Event-triggered by page churn	Every cull, rename or restructure. Google puts the floor at "generally at least 1 year" and suggests keeping them indefinitely for users
Analytics and tag maintenance	Event-triggered	Consent changes, a new campaign taxonomy, a CRM migration, a platform deprecation. Broken measurement is invisible until a quarterly review
Accessibility fixes	Variable	New components, new content patterns, and in some markets a procurement requirement rather than a preference

Tier 3. Keep it shipping: this is development, priced as development. Rocket.net lists "custom development" under its premium services and Network Solutions puts "custom development" inside its $500 to $5,000+ premium tier, which is why the top of those two published ranges looks alarming.

Line item	Cost behavior	What moves it
New pages on existing templates	Variable with volume	Publishing cadence. Cheap per page if the templates and the content model are right
New templates and components	Event-triggered	A launch, a pricing change, a new segment, a funding announcement, a rebrand
Design system and component library upkeep	Variable, and compounding if deferred	Every one-off component that does not go back into the library becomes a second thing to maintain

In our implementation work the most under-budgeted line by some distance is the second one in Tier 2, because a major upgrade is a calendar fact that people treat as a surprise. The release date is public months ahead. The only variable is whether you take it in one planned window or discover it when a security patch stops being backported.

Which lines does a brochure site not have?

Seven of them. Six sit in Tier 2 and one in Tier 3, which is the whole argument for treating a software marketing site as its own budget category rather than a bigger version of a brochure site.

• Application dependencies: a brochure site on a hosted builder has no package.json. Its security surface is the platform's problem. Yours is yours.
• A runtime with an expiry date: your language runtime and framework have documented support windows, and support ends whether or not you were paying attention.
• Performance regression per release: a site that changes weekly can regress weekly. A site that changes twice a year cannot.
• A component library: shared components are an asset with an upkeep cost. Builder templates are somebody else's asset.
• Structured data tied to changing page types: product, pricing and comparison pages change shape more often than an about page does.
• A redirect map that keeps growing: software companies rename things. Positioning shifts, products merge, use-case pages get consolidated, and every one of those events leaves URLs behind.
• Measurement tied to product events: a trial signup that has to reach the CRM is a maintained integration, not a form.

If none of those seven describes your site, the published ranges probably do fit you, and you should use them. Plenty of good companies run a marketing site that genuinely is a brochure, and paying software-site prices for one would be waste.

Should you buy a retainer, pay hourly, or hire in-house?

Count first, then choose. Go back through the last 90 days and count the number of times somebody needed a change to the website that a marketer could not make alone. That count, not your budget, is the input to this decision.

Arrangement	The change frequency it fits	Where it stops working
Hourly or on-demand	Zero to two developer-needed changes a quarter, and Tier 1 handled by a managed platform	Response time. Nobody is watching between tickets, so Tier 2 accumulates silently. Network Solutions publishes technical support at $50 to $200 per hour and Rocket.net publishes standard support at $150 to $250 per hour, which is fine for a fix and poor value for vigilance
Retainer	Roughly one to four a month, or any site where Tier 2 needs an owner	Scope drift. A retainer that quietly absorbs Tier 3 turns into a development budget with a maintenance label, which is exactly how a $500 arrangement becomes a $5,000 one
In-house or embedded	Weekly or more, or the site is a product surface with continuous integration into the app	Opportunity cost and bus factor. One engineer who owns the marketing site is a single point of failure, and their time is the most expensive time in a seed-stage company

From my experience working on marketing sites for software companies, that count lands higher than the founder expects, because small requests are invisible until you list them. A favicon swap, a legal page, a new logo on the customers strip, a UTM change. None is a project. Together they are a cadence, and cadence is what a retainer is for.

When to buy none of the three: if the site changes less than once a quarter and sits on a managed platform, an annual half-day review plus monitoring is a defensible answer. Paying a monthly fee for vigilance you do not need is the same mistake as skipping vigilance you do.

How much of the maintenance budget should go to SEO?

None of it, if the budget is drawn properly, because these are two lines with two different jobs. Maintenance protects what already works. A search program buys ground you do not have yet. Merging them makes both untrackable, and it is one reason the published figures are so hard to compare: Hostinger folds "marketing and SEO" into its maintenance total at $0 to $500 or more per month, so two quotes carrying the same label can contain entirely different work.

The honest overlap is Tier 2. Patching, performance, redirects and structured data are maintenance lines that happen to be the technical floor a search program stands on, which is set out in full in our guide to keeping a site search-ready. Budget them as maintenance and count them once.

Performance deserves a note here because it is the line people assume is finished. The Web Vitals overview published by Google states plainly that "the metrics that make up Core Web Vitals will evolve over time", and documents a lifecycle in which metrics move through experimental and pending stages before becoming stable. A site that passed two years ago was measured against a set that has since changed. That is why Core Web Vitals regression is a standing line rather than a project you finish.

What happens if you skip maintenance for a year?

Four things, in a fairly predictable order, and none of them is dramatic on the day it happens. That is precisely the problem.

1. The upgrade path stops being incremental: twelve months of skipped minor releases is not twelve small jobs saved. It is one large job created, because the safe path between two major versions runs through the releases you skipped.
2. Your runtime leaves its support window: Node.js publishes the schedule in advance, with 30 months of critical bug fixes on an LTS line and the explicit instruction that production should run Active or Maintenance LTS. You can read the Node.js release history and support policy and know your date years ahead.
3. Performance drifts below the threshold with no single cause: a year of small additions, each defensible, is the classic way a fast site becomes a slow one. There is no incident to point at and no rollback that fixes it.
4. The redirect map rots: a page cull without a map turns live URLs into 404s, and any external links pointing at them stop transferring anything. Google's site move documentation puts the floor at "generally at least 1 year" and suggests keeping them indefinitely from a user's point of view, so the shelf life of this work is measured in years, not sprints.

What I am not claiming: that skipping a year causes a ranking collapse. It usually does not, and anyone selling maintenance on that promise is overstating it. What it reliably causes is a year in which every change costs more than it should, and a backlog that eventually gets priced as a rebuild. If that is where you have ended up, the honest comparison is when a rebuild is cheaper than maintaining rather than a bigger retainer.

What should a maintenance quote contain?

Enough itemization to argue with. A single monthly figure against the word "maintenance" gives you nothing to push back on, and against a published spread of $5 to over $5,000 it tells you nothing about what you are buying.

• Every line assigned to a tier: keep the lights on, keep it fast and indexable, keep it shipping. If a vendor cannot sort their own line items into those three, the quote is a number rather than a scope.
• A named upgrade policy: who applies dependency patches, on what cadence, and what happens at a major version. "Best effort" is not a policy.
• Response times by severity: site down, feature broken, cosmetic. Three numbers, in writing.
• Account ownership: who holds the hosting, domain, CMS, analytics and certificate accounts. The correct answer is you, in every case, with the vendor holding access.
• The in-scope boundary: the precise sentence that separates a fix from a change request, with two worked examples of each.
• A performance budget tied to release: the thresholds a deploy has to meet, and who is accountable when a release misses them.
• Included hours versus rollover: whether unused hours expire monthly, and whether a heavy month borrows against a light one.
• The exit: notice period, handover contents, and how long they keep your credentials afterwards.

If you want that scope drawn alongside the build rather than retrofitted a year later, our web development work treats the operating model as part of the architecture, because the decisions that set your maintenance bill are made during the build, not after it.

One habit is worth more than any of this. Tag every website request that arrives, all quarter, with its tier. It takes seconds per request, and after ninety days you have something no published range can give you: your own change frequency, your own tier mix, and a maintenance number you derived rather than borrowed.

This week, find the end-of-support date for your site's runtime and framework and put it in a calendar. That one date tells you whether your next upgrade is a patch or a project, and it is the cheapest piece of budget intelligence available to you.