A company website costs money not only when it is being built. After launch, the second and longer part of the budget begins: hosting, domains, certificates, email, updates and someone’s time to react when things break. In our cost audits we keep seeing the same patterns - and the same places where companies pay more than they need to.
The figures in this article come from the Polish market. We are a web development company in Krakow, Poland - inside the EU and working in the CET time zone - so if you are comparing the cost of looking after a website locally with handing it to a Polish team, the table below gives you real numbers in PLN with an approximate euro equivalent.
What maintenance costs consist of
A typical set of recurring fees around a company website looks like this:
- Hosting - from a few euros per month for shared hosting to much more for a VPS or dedicated server.
- Domains - yearly renewals; the price depends on the TLD and registrar, and after the first promotional year it often grows severalfold.
- SSL certificates - usually available for free today (e.g. Let’s Encrypt), yet some companies still pay for certificates they do not need.
- Company email - bundled with hosting, at a separate provider, or in Google Workspace / Microsoft 365; price differences are significant and the choice also affects deliverability.
- Updates and backups - the CMS, plugins, theme and database need regular work; without it, the risk of outages and break-ins grows.
- Technical care - someone’s time: an internal employee, a freelancer or an agency.
Each item looks innocent on its own. The problem is that in most companies these services accumulated over years across different providers, and nobody sees them together.
Yearly website maintenance costs in Poland: the numbers
The same list in figures. Where the price depends on the provider, we say what it depends on; where we have our own price list, we give our amounts.
| Component | Cost | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | from a few euros per month (shared) to much more for a VPS; with us PLN 500 net per year (≈ €115) | a match with the size of the site, and backups on the provider’s side |
| Domain | depends on the TLD and registrar | the renewal price can be several times the first-year price |
| SSL certificate | usually free (e.g. Let’s Encrypt) | a paid certificate is rarely needed for a company website |
| Company email | depends on the provider, number and size of mailboxes | deliverability, and who has access to the admin panel |
| Technical care | with us PLN 300 / 500 / 900 net per month (≈ €70 / €115 / €205), i.e. PLN 3,600 / 6,000 / 10,800 net per year (≈ €820 / €1,370 / €2,460) | what the plan covers: updates, backups, monitoring, response times |
| Work beyond the plan | with us PLN 200 net per hour (≈ €45) | a quote and your approval before work starts |
Euro amounts are approximate, converted at the National Bank of Poland (NBP) rate of 5 October 2026 (EUR 1 = PLN 4.3855) and rounded. What each plan includes is described on our website care service page.
5 questions to ask your maintenance provider
Whoever looks after your website — a local freelancer or an agency — these five questions tell you what you are actually paying for:
- What happens every month? Updates of the system, plugins and theme, with a backup before and a check after — or nothing until something breaks?
- Where are the backups and how often? Daily copies of files and the database, stored outside the server, tested at least quarterly.
- How fast do you react, and to what? Response time for a normal request and for a critical outage; whether evenings and weekends count.
- What happens to unused hours and how is extra work billed? Hours that expire, a fixed price per task, or an hourly meter.
- Who owns the access? Hosting, domain and admin accounts registered to your company, with a handover procedure if you part ways.
For readers outside Europe: our plans of PLN 300 / 500 / 900 net per month are roughly $75 / $130 / $230 at the National Bank of Poland rate of 19 October 2026; local prices in the US or the UK are typically higher.
Where companies overpay most often
After reviewing dozens of setups, we see a few recurring scenarios:
Hosting mismatched to scale
A small brochure website on an expensive, unmanaged VPS - or the opposite: a growing store on the cheapest shared hosting that chokes during every ad campaign. The price itself is not the problem; the missing link between price and need is.
Orphaned services
Domains bought for a long-forgotten campaign, premium certificates renewed out of inertia, hosting add-ons activated once and abandoned. This is usually a few hundred per year doing nothing.
No single owner of the topic
The most expensive scenario is not on any price list. When the domain sits with one provider, hosting with another, email with a third, and a former employee holds the passwords - every outage turns into an investigation. The cost is then counted in days of downtime, not in monthly fees.
How to calculate your own maintenance cost
A simple starting routine:
- Collect invoices for hosting, domains, SSL, email and any website-adjacent services from the last 12 months.
- Add time - who handles updates, backups and outages, and how often.
- For every line item answer one question: what would happen if this service did not exist?
If there is no good answer for an item, it is the first candidate for simplification.
Not everything is worth cutting
To be fair: the cheapest setup is rarely the best one. Backups, monitoring, reliable email and someone on technical duty are costs that pay off exactly at the moment of failure. The goal of cleaning up is not the lowest invoice, but a situation where you know what you pay for and why.
What does technical care cost in concrete numbers? Our website care plans start at PLN 300 net per month (≈ €70) - the scope and price of all three plans are published openly, so you can easily compare them with what you pay today.
If you want to check your own costs without digging through provider panels, send us a service list or invoices - within 3 business days we return a PDF: what to keep, what to simplify and where the real risks are. No obligations.