Every business needs a website. The decision is not whether to have one — it is how to get one built, maintained, and performing without a budget that assumes you already have a VP of Engineering on payroll.
The three options and what they actually cost
The market offers three meaningful approaches, and each has a real cost profile that the headline price obscures.
- DIY (Wix, Squarespace, Webflow): $0–30/mo, 2–8 hours to launch, no developer required. The cost is not the subscription — it is the capability ceiling. You cannot add custom logic, custom integrations, or a performance guarantee. For a 3-page brochure site with no conversion requirement, this is fine.
- Agency custom build: $10,000–80,000 upfront, 8–16 weeks, dedicated developer time. You own the code. Maintenance is an afterthought — most agencies do not include it at the project price, so you pay hourly for changes or let the site go stale.
- WaaS (Website as a Service): $99–249/mo, 2–4 week build, dev-maintained. No large upfront cost. The subscription covers updates, hosting, SSL, forms, and performance monitoring. The domain stays yours.
None of these is universally correct. The right one depends on what you need the site to do and how much engineering resource you can sustain after launch.
Who WaaS is actually right for
WaaS is not the right model for every business. It is specifically right for a few clearly defined situations.
- Local service businesses — dental, legal, trade — whose marketing is mostly inbound and referral. These sites need to be fast, clear, and updatable, not architecturally complex.
- Businesses spending £200+/mo on paid leads but running a site that converts at 1–2%. A WaaS rebuild pays back in weeks if the conversion rate moves to industry average.
- Startups that need to launch before they have a CTO. WaaS buys time without locking the business into a platform they cannot escape.
WaaS is not right for businesses that need custom application logic, e-commerce with complex inventory management, or a B2B SaaS product that requires deep integration between the marketing site and the product backend. Those need a custom build.
What "professionally maintained" actually means in a WaaS
The average agency-built site is 3.7 years old and has not received a substantial update since launch, according to Google PageSpeed data from 2024. That is not a criticism of agencies — maintenance is simply not what an upfront project model incentivises.
A WaaS subscription covers the things that decay silently when no one is watching:
- Monthly content updates on request — copy changes, new service pages, new case studies
- Dependency updates — Next.js minor releases, npm packages with security advisories
- Performance monitoring — Core Web Vitals checks and regression alerts
- Hosting with a 99.9% uptime SLA and SSL renewal handled
These are table stakes that the upfront model quietly excludes. You do not notice they are missing until the site is down at 11pm on a Friday or a Google algorithm update tanks the Lighthouse score.
The total cost of ownership comparison
Run the 3-year maths and the numbers clarify quickly.
- DIY: $360–$1,080 over 3 years (Squarespace plan), zero dev cost, opportunity cost of sub-2% conversion and capability ceiling
- Agency custom build: $25,000 upfront plus $3,000/yr maintenance if you negotiate it — $34,000 over 3 years, and that assumes you found an agency that offers a maintenance retainer at all
- WaaS: $149/mo × 36 months = $5,364 over 3 years, domain included, updates included, performance monitoring included
The break-even against an agency custom build is roughly $5k in the first year. If the site generates more than one inbound deal — for any service priced above $5k — WaaS pays back within the first month.
The total cost of a website is not the invoice you pay on day one. It is the invoice plus every hour you spend managing a vendor to fix something, every month the site is slow, and every lead that bounced because the form did not work.
What you never give up in a WaaS model
Three questions come up in every WaaS conversation, and they deserve direct answers.
- Domain ownership: you own the domain. We manage DNS records during the engagement. If you cancel, you point the domain elsewhere the same day.
- Code ownership: on request, you receive the full Next.js repository. The code is not locked inside a proprietary platform — it runs on standard infrastructure you can hand to any developer.
- Exit rights: cancel any month with 30 days notice. There is no minimum term beyond the first month. A WaaS is a managed service, not a platform that holds your site hostage.
These are not generous terms we offer to be competitive. They are the baseline for any honest service relationship. If a WaaS provider cannot offer all three, that is the question to ask before you sign anything.
How to decide
The decision tree is short.
- You need the site in a week and have no development budget: DIY on Webflow or Framer. Both have good templates and clear ceilings.
- You need custom application logic, a design system that spans product and marketing, or deep integrations with external systems: custom build. Find an agency that includes a maintenance retainer in the scope.
- You need a professionally built, maintained, high-converting site without a large upfront cost: WaaS. The economics work for any business where one inbound lead covers several months of subscription.
- You already have a site that converts below 3% and was built more than two years ago: audit first. Check Core Web Vitals, form completion rates, and mobile performance before you rebuild. The audit usually confirms the rebuild — but it means the rebuild has a baseline to beat.
The WaaS model is not new. Managed hosting has existed for decades. What changed is that the build quality caught up — modern static-first frameworks mean a WaaS site can match the performance of a custom build, at a fraction of the first-year cost, with ongoing maintenance baked in rather than negotiated separately.
If any of the criteria above fit your situation, the comparison is worth running. The maths is not complicated.