A website with no monthly fees
No, a website does not need a monthly fee. A well-made small site is a set of simple, fast files, and serving those files to everyone who visits costs so close to nothing that it can honestly be free. The monthly bill on most websites is the business model of whoever sold it to you, not the cost of keeping your site alive. This page explains where those fees come from, the one recurring cost that is real, and how to check any “no monthly fees” claim, including ours.
Last updated July 2026 · prices read from published pages, July 2026
The short answerNo. And it’s worth saying plainly.
A small organisation’s website is usually a handful of pages, some words, some photos, a contact form. Built well, that is static files: they get sent to a visitor’s browser and nothing has to think very hard on the way. The cost of doing that for a small site’s worth of traffic is fractions of a cent, which is why free hosting for sites like this genuinely exists and is not a trick.
So when a website carries a monthly fee, that fee is almost never the running cost. It is the shape of the deal. Subscription platforms bill monthly because the plan is the product, and a builder may bill monthly because the site sits on a metered server. Sometimes the arrangement was simply written that way years ago, and nobody revisited it once the technology got cheaper.
None of that is a scam, and plenty of monthly arrangements are sold by honest people. But the fee is presented almost everywhere as a fact of life, and it isn’t one. There are websites running in New Zealand right now that cost their owners nothing to keep online, and have for years.
Ours are built that way on purpose, so here is the whole of our own price in one line. $800 once, or $400 at the community rate for organisations where $800 would genuinely be a stretch, and then $0 a month: hosting free, no plan, no card on file. A batch of edits is $20 if and when you want changes. The one bill that keeps coming is your domain name, and the next section is about exactly that.
Your domain name, about $65 a year
There is one recurring cost we will never pretend away, and we would rather you read it here than find it later. Your domain name, the address people type, has to be registered, and registration is annual. A .nz or .co.nz name costs about $65 a year, paid to a registrar of your choice. That is true of any provider in the country, ours included.
We put it this early because a “no fees at all” claim that quietly leaves the domain out is exactly the kind of claim this page exists to help you test. Nobody anywhere holds a domain name outright forever; every one of them is registered a year at a time. What you can hold is the thing that matters more: the registration in your organisation’s name, not your web person’s. That is the deed. If your domain is registered to whoever built your site, then moving, or even just leaving, needs their cooperation.
We set your domain up with you, in your name, and we never hold it. If you ever leave us, nothing about your address changes.
Monthly website bills come in three shapes
Figures from providers’ own published pricing pages, read in July 2026. We don’t name anyone, because the point is the shape of the deal rather than a fight with a competitor. The column most people never ask about is the last one.
Two of these often arrive on one invoice that never breaks them out. If your website costs you something every month and you couldn’t say which of these three it is, ask your provider for the breakdown. It’s a fair question and a good provider will answer it in a sentence.
Four questions to put to any “no monthly fees” offer
Plenty of people advertise no monthly fees. Some mean it completely, some mean it until year two. These four questions sort them out in about five minutes, and we’ve answered each one for ourselves underneath so you can hold us to the same standard.
“Whose name is the domain registered in?” If the answer is anything other than your organisation’s, the no-fee promise has a lever behind it. Ours: yours, always. We set it up in your name and never hold it.
“What does hosting cost after the first year?” Free hosting for twelve months and then a plan is a discount, not a no-fee offer. Ask for the year-two number in writing. Ours: free, with no year-two number, no plan, and no card on file.
“What does one small edit cost, and how long does it take?” A site nobody can afford to change quietly becomes a site nobody changes. Ours: $20 for a batch of edits, however many are in it, usually back within a couple of days. A year with no changes costs nothing.
“If I leave tomorrow, what do I take with me?” This is the one that sorts owning from renting, and it costs nothing to ask before you sign. Ours: everything. The whole site exports free, any time, and your domain was never ours to hand back.
What a Freehold site costs, all of it
Not a pitch, just the numbers, so you can weigh them against whatever you’re paying now.
$800 builds the whole site, once. $400 is our published community rate for organisations where $800 would genuinely be a stretch, and it buys the same build, the same care and the same ownership, by rule. We aren’t GST registered, so the price you read is the whole amount.
After that the list is short. Hosting is free, with no plan behind it and no expiry. Changes are $20 for a batch of edits, whenever you actually want one, so a quiet year costs you nothing at all. And if something on the site is wrong, we fix it for nothing, because that is not a change, that is us not having got it right. The whole site exports free at any time, which means you are never staying with us because leaving is hard. And your domain sits at about $65 a year, registered in your name, paid to your own registrar.
We also build it before you decide. You see your real site, live and hosted, and you only pay if you want to keep it. How it works walks the whole thing through, step by step.
When paying monthly is genuinely the right call
We’d rather you picked the right arrangement than picked us, so here is the case against this page. If your website is a working part of the business every day, a shop taking orders or a booking system under real load, then a standing monthly arrangement buys you a team on call, and that is worth money. Some sites truly need one.
The same goes if you want to edit the site yourself, constantly, from your phone. The subscription platforms are good at that, and paying monthly for a tool you use every week is a fair trade rather than a trap. What makes a monthly fee worth questioning is when it buys readiness you never use.
Most small organisations and businesses aren’t in either of those situations. Their site changes a few times a year, and the fee runs every month regardless. If that sounds like yours, and you’re already inside a monthly arrangement, Going Freehold is the calm way to look before you leap. We rebuild your site free and privately, and you decide with the finished thing in front of you.
Asked and answered, plainly
The rest of the sums
This page answers the yes or no question. If you want the two arrangements added up instead, over three years with the working shown, that’s a one-off $800 vs a monthly retainer. The whole New Zealand market mapped from published prices: what a website really costs in New Zealand. The ownership question on its own, which is the one underneath all of this: owning vs renting your website. If you’re currently renting and want a way out: Going Freehold. And the whole process from first email to handover: how it works.
Send us the invoice line, we’ll tell you what it is
Tell us what your website costs you each month and what you get for it. If the arrangement you have is genuinely right for you, we’ll say so and leave you to it.