What are you actually paying for every month?
Most people we ask cannot name everything on the invoice. It is worth an hour to find out.
We asked a bloke what his monthly web bill covered. He was not sure. It had been going out for about six years, and the fellow who set it up had moved on.
He is not careless. He is normal. Web costs are small enough to ignore and technical enough to feel like someone else’s department, so they run quietly in the background for years.
Here is how to find out what you are paying for, and what each line is meant to be doing.
Get the list first
Search the last twelve months of your statement for anything web related, then check your email for renewal notices, because some of it is annual and easy to miss.
Your domain name. The address itself. Small, and you should keep paying it. Check whose name it is registered in. If it is not yours, sort that out this month, ahead of everything else on this list.
Hosting. Where the site lives. Also worth paying for, though what you get varies a lot.
A care plan or maintenance retainer. The one to look at hardest. Sometimes it is real work: updates applied, backups tested, things fixed when they break, someone answering the phone when the site goes down. Sometimes it is an automated update email once a month.
An SEO retainer. Same again. Some are genuinely working. Some have been sending the same ranking report since 2021.
Plugins, themes and licences. Usually annual, usually forgotten, sometimes still charging for something the site no longer uses.
Email. Often bundled with hosting, often not, occasionally paid twice.
The questions worth asking
For each line, two questions. What did this do for me in the last three months, and what happens if I stop paying it.
For the care plan and the SEO retainer, ask the provider for the last three months of work. A good one answers that in a day, because they have it. That answer tells you most of what you need.
For hosting and the domain, do not cancel anything until you know where things live and who holds the keys. Turning off the wrong line takes your site or your email down, which is a much worse afternoon than the one you were trying to save.
We are not telling you to cancel everything
Some of these are worth every cent. A host quietly keeping you online, and a person who actually fixes things when they break, are both cheaper than the alternative.
The point is that you should be able to say what each line buys. Most people cannot, and the gap between what they pay and what they get sits inside that.
An hour with a statement and this list closes it.
If you want to know whether the site itself is holding up its end, that part takes seconds with our free audit. It is not on any invoice, and you keep whatever it finds.
Give it a burl.