How Much Does a Website Cost per Month? Our Stack Runs Under $50

A custom website with a content editor costs about $20 a month to run on our usual stack: Vercel Pro hosting at $20 a month, with Sanity's editor and Resend's email on their free plans. If the project also needs a database and sign-in, Supabase Pro adds from $25 a month, for about $45 a month in total. Your domain is extra, paid yearly to whichever registrar you bought it from. Prices as of October 2026.

The monthly bill, line by line

That's about $20 a month for the website and editor, and about $45 with a database. Each plan includes usage allowances, and going over them costs extra. Vercel Pro, for example, includes 1 million CDN requests and 1 TB of data transfer a month. Check your own traffic against the allowances on Vercel, Sanity, Resend and Supabase before launch.

If your database connection needs a dedicated IPv4 address, Supabase's optional IPv4 add-on adds $4 a month, billed at $0.0055 an hour per project, on paid plans. That makes the Pro plus IPv4 baseline about $29 per month, or about $49 including a separate Vercel Pro subscription. Larger compute, extra projects and usage can raise the bill. When hosting is included in your maintenance package, do not add a second standalone hosting charge.

Why not host on Vercel's free plan?

Vercel's Hobby plan is $0, but only for eligible personal, non-commercial projects. A business website is commercial, so it goes on Pro. Our guide to hosting Next.js for free explains what the free plans allow and when you outgrow them.

What do WordPress hosts charge after the first term?

The low prices shared hosts advertise are first-term rates, and the renewal price is what you pay after that. As of October 2026, SiteGround's StartUp plan is $2.99/mo prepaid for 12 months and renews at $17.99/mo, about 6 times the first-term rate. Bluehost Starter is $3.99/mo on a 36-month term and renews at $9.99/mo. Hostinger Premium is $2.99/mo on a 48-month term, $143.52 paid upfront, and renews at $10.99/mo.

To compare hosts fairly, put the renewal prices side by side and note how long you have to commit to get the first-term rate. These are the hosts' own published prices, and promotions change often, so check SiteGround, Bluehost and Hostinger before you buy. On our maintenance or SEO package, hosting is included, so there is no separate hosting renewal to plan for.

Thanks to Randy Hilliard, whose Renewal Price Shock Index on BestReviewGuide.co pointed us to this gap. His index tracks intro and renewal prices across 29 plans and says openly that the tools it covers are affiliate partners. We checked every price above on the hosts' own pages.

Why we start on Supabase's free plan

We build on Supabase's Free plan and switch to Pro when the project goes live, so you don't pay for the database during the build. The Free plan is $0 a month, with 500 MB database, 1 GB file storage, 50,000 monthly active users, 2 active projects; free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity and have no included automatic backups. Those last two limits are why a live business app goes on Pro. Not every site needs Supabase at all: read Sanity vs Supabase to see whether yours does.

When does Sanity start costing money?

Most small business websites stay on Sanity's Free plan, which covers up to 20 user seats, 2 public datasets, 10,000 documents, 1 million API CDN requests and 100 GB bandwidth a month; 3 days of draft change history and 2 permission roles. You'd move to Growth, at $15 per seat a month, if you need up to 50 user seats, 25,000 documents, private datasets and 90 days of draft change history and 5 permission roles. Growth is charged per editor, so three editors on Growth would add $45 a month. Ladies 4 Jesus, a client site we moved from WordPress, runs on the Free plan: traffic is low and only a few people edit it.

Who owns each account?

You buy your domain in your own name. We've never bought a domain for a client, and most of our clients already owned theirs, so your web address never depends on us. When a project needs Supabase, it goes on your own account at launch, as it does for A Step Above Medical.

Hosting depends on how you work with us. If you take our maintenance or SEO package and want us to host it, the site runs on our Vercel account and the hosting is included in the package. If you cancel, or would rather run it yourself, we move it to a Vercel account in your name. We did this for a medical practice client when their contract ended. Our guide to checking that you own your website lists what to ask any developer.

Separate the build, ongoing services and advertising budget

The build price is fixed once the written scope is agreed. Additional features are priced separately and only proceed after written approval. Maintenance and advertising management have their own agreed scope and fee. The advertising budget pays for ad placements and is separate from the management fee. Provider subscriptions and usage charges should also be listed separately, with hosting identified as included when it is part of the package.

What isn't in the monthly bill

These are the vendor bills only. Building the site is a separate, one-time cost, covered in how much a website costs, and maintenance, SEO and new features are priced separately again. Paid tools you add later, such as a booking system, have their own plans.

Planning a site on this stack? See our Sanity website development service, or our backend development service for a database and custom CRM.