A UK organisation was paying an agency £3,000 a month to look after its website, with another £500 going on servers. After a month of migration work the same site costs £29 a month to run, and the organisation owns every part of it.
£3,500/mo
agency retainer + servers
£29/mo
hosting, owned outright
£41,000+/yr
in direct costs
~1 month
no downtime
Like a lot of organisations, this one handed its website to an agency years ago and stopped looking at the numbers. The retainer covered hosting, maintenance and changes, but every change meant raising a ticket and waiting. Small text tweaks took days. Bigger jobs were quoted separately, on top of the £3,500 already going out every month.
There was nothing wrong with the site itself. It just didn’t need anything like that level of spend to keep it running.
Over roughly a month, the site was rebuilt and moved onto modern hosting that costs £29 a month. The organisation now holds all of its own accounts and logins, and owns the code outright. Day-to-day running moved in-house, with AI development tools doing most of the heavy lifting. A content change that used to be an agency ticket now gets done the same day.
The old site stayed live until the new one was proven, so there was no downtime. All the agency had to do was a standard handover.
A saving this size deserves a bit of scrutiny, so here is the other side of the ledger. The site isn’t free to run. Somebody technical now spends a few hours a month on updates and small fixes, and that time is a real cost even though it never shows up on an invoice.
If you’d rather not take that on yourself, our care plan covers it from £95 a month. Set against a £3,500 retainer, that still leaves over £3,300 a month.
The consultant behind raising water delivered this project for a UK organisation that would rather not be named. We’ll respect that preference for any client who asks. The numbers are real, and if you’re in or near Cheltenham we’re happy to go through the detail in person.