If you run a private practice, you've probably been quoted somewhere between $50 and $100 a month for a website — from a platform like Brighter Vision, TherapySites, or a Squarespace-plus-add-ons setup. It feels reasonable. It's a small number, it's predictable, and it means you don't have to think about it. That's exactly the point.
But a monthly number is easy to underestimate, and there are a couple of things those plans don't put on the invoice. It's worth looking at both before you renew.
The number is bigger than it looks
Sixty dollars a month sounds like nothing. Stretched out, it's a different picture:
- $60/month is $720 a year — and about $3,600 over five years.
- At $90/month, you're near $5,400 over five years, and the meter never stops.
- Most platforms also raise prices over time, so the real five-year figure usually runs higher than today's rate.
A one-time, hand-coded site is a fixed number you pay once. Somewhere in years two or three, the subscription math crosses over it — and after that, every month is pure savings. The exact break-even depends on the plan you're comparing, but for most practices it lands well inside the normal life of a website.
The part that isn't on the invoice
The bigger issue isn't monthly cost. It's what you actually own.
On most subscription platforms, you're renting the whole thing: the templates, the hosting, and often the specific arrangement of your own content. When you stop paying, the site comes down. Not "you lose some features" — the whole site goes dark. Years of copy, the pages Google learned to trust, the URL your past clients bookmarked: gone, or held until you resume payment.
You can spend three years building something and still not own it.
That's the quiet cost. You're not just paying for a website — you're paying to keep it from disappearing.
What "owning it" actually means
When a site is built for you and handed over, ownership is concrete and boring in the best way:
- Your domain is registered in your name, on your account. Nobody can hold it hostage.
- Your code lives in a repository that's yours — readable, backed up, and portable to any developer on earth.
- Your hosting is a free account in your name. Static sites cost essentially nothing to serve, so there's no monthly bill to lapse.
- Your content is plain files you keep, not entries trapped in someone else's database.
If you and I never spoke again, your site would keep running exactly as it is. That's the test that matters.
When renting is genuinely the right call
To be fair: subscription platforms exist for real reasons, and sometimes they're the honest answer. If you need a site live this week, if you truly want to drag-and-drop your own pages daily, or if you're testing whether a practice is even going to happen, a monthly platform can be the sensible, low-commitment move. There's no shame in starting there.
The trouble is that "temporary" tends to become "five years and counting." If your practice is established and you plan to be online for the long haul, renting quietly stops being the cheap option.
A simple way to decide
Ask yourself one question: if my website platform doubled its price tomorrow, or shut down, what would I actually keep? If the honest answer is "not much," it's worth pricing out what owning the thing outright would cost — usually less than you'd guess, and paid only once.
That's the whole idea behind how I build. Every site is hand-coded, handed over, and yours — domain, hosting, and code all in your name, with no monthly platform fee waiting to climb.
Curious what that would look like for your practice? Tell me a little about it and I'll give you a straight answer — even if that answer is "stay where you are for now."