A quote for a website is a quote for building one. The running cost afterwards is rarely written down anywhere, which is how businesses end up surprised by a renewal invoice two years later. Here is the whole picture for a typical small company site.
The unavoidable line items
- Domain: R180 to R350 a year for .co.za or .com. Non-negotiable, and it is the cheapest thing on the list.
- Hosting: R0 to R450 a month. A static marketing site can genuinely run on a free tier; anything with a database cannot.
- Business email: R95 to R190 per mailbox per month, depending on the platform and the licence.
- TLS certificate: R0. If somebody is billing you for this, ask why: automatic certificates have been free and standard for years.
The ones people forget
Stock photography, if the site uses it, is a licence rather than a purchase. Font licensing is the same, and web embedding is a separate right from desktop use, and this is the single most common thing we find missing when we inherit a brand. Both are annual costs that nobody puts in the original quote.
Then there is maintenance. A site left alone for two years is not stable, it is stale: dependencies with published vulnerabilities, prices that are wrong, and staff on the team page who left. Budget for either a monthly care agreement or a day of somebody's time a quarter.
A realistic annual figure
For a five-person business with a marketing site and five mailboxes: roughly R300 for the domain, R3 000 for hosting, R6 000 for email, and R10 000 for maintenance. About R19 000 a year, or R1 600 a month, on top of whatever the build cost.
If a proposal does not tell you the running cost, it is not a proposal. Ask for it in rands per month before you sign anything.
Where you can genuinely save
Hosting, mostly. A brochure site does not need a virtual server, and the difference between a managed platform and a VPS you have to patch yourself is several hundred rand a month plus the risk. Do not save on the domain, the backups or the maintenance: those are the three that cost the most when they fail.