The full parts list for owning your site outright: the domain, the hosting fine print, the builder subscription, and the one cost nobody puts a price on.
Running your own website is a real option, and plenty of owners do it well. What trips people up is that "doing it yourself" sounds like one decision when it is really a small stack of subscriptions and recurring chores, and nobody lays the stack out in one place before you commit to it. Here is the whole list with honest prices attached, as of this month.
The domain is your address on the internet, the yourbusiness.com part, and it is the one line here that stays cheap. Registering one costs about $12 a year at a normal registrar.
The catch is the renewal. Domains expire, the cards on file expire faster, and an expired domain takes your website and your email down with it at the same time. If you own your domain, write the renewal date somewhere you will actually look, and check the billing card once a year. That is the entire job, and skipping it is how a business vanishes from the internet for a weekend.
Hosting is the computer your site actually lives on. Its pricing is the strangest part of this list, because the same job is free on some platforms and about $20 a month on others, and telling those two situations apart is the confusing part. The difference rarely sits on the pricing page. It sits in the terms of service.
The pattern worth knowing is that free hosting tiers are generally meant for personal projects, and the terms usually say that commercial use requires a paid plan. A business site on a free tier can hum along for months and still be on the wrong side of the rules the whole time. If you are going the fully self-managed route, plan on the paid tier and read the commercial-use line before you build anything on top of it.
If you want to change your site without touching code, you need an editor, and editors are subscriptions. As of July 2026, Squarespace plans run $16 to $39 a month depending on the tier, and Wix's business plan comes to about $36 a month when billed annually. Those prices include hosting, which is why the all-in-one builders are the most common self-service path. The newer AI-assisted editing tools, where you describe a change in plain words and the software makes it, run around $20 a month for the good ones.
None of these numbers is scary on its own. The point is the stack. Add the domain to a builder plan, or to hosting plus an editing tool, and full self-service usually lands somewhere between about $17 and $60 a month once every trial period ends and everything renews at full price.
Every cost breakdown like this one stops at the subscriptions, and the subscriptions are the smaller half.
The real cost of running your own site is time. Someone has to make the edits when the hours change. Someone has to figure out why the contact form stopped sending, and whether the builder's redesigned editor moved the button you finally knew how to find. Someone has to decide, a dozen times a year, whether a small problem is worth an evening.
In a small business, "someone" means the owner. None of the homework is hard, but it recurs, and it lands during the hours you would otherwise spend on the business itself or at home. The honest comparison for anyone weighing self-service is homework-hours against a monthly fee. Whatever your evenings are worth is the real price on this line, and only you know that number.
For what it is worth, my own answer to this list is to collapse it. I host client sites for $25 a month with small edits included, with the rest of what I offer laid out on my home page, and the arrangement moves the renewals and the recurring chores off the owner's desk and onto mine.
That is one option among several, and I will not pretend it is the only sensible one. Plenty of owners like this kind of work and are good at it, and for them the subscriptions above are the whole cost, fairly priced.
If tinkering with your own site sounds satisfying, self-service is the cheaper path in cash, and you should walk it with the full list in view. Budget for paid hosting where the terms require it, and put every renewal on a calendar you actually check.
If the same list reads like a second job, then the subscriptions were never the number to compare. The number is the evenings. Once you price those honestly, a monthly fee stops looking like the expensive choice and starts looking like what it is, which is somebody else doing the homework.
Tell me what you're building. I'll come back with a plan for what the site should actually do.