Why we build websites as a subscription

The traditional way to buy a website for a small business goes like this: pay a five-figure lump sum, get a site, then watch it slowly decay over three years while nobody has budget to touch it.

We don't build that way. Websites at Terho Solutions are delivered as a monthly subscription. This piece explains why, what is included, and when we'd tell you to buy something else.

What breaks with the one-off model

The one-off website is priced as if the work ends at launch. It doesn't. A live website needs:

• Hosting, TLS, and DNS that actually stay up
• Regular dependency and security updates
• Content edits — new services, new team members, new case studies
• Performance and Core Web Vitals monitoring
• SEO adjustments as Google's expectations shift
• Analytics that someone actually looks at

In a lump-sum project, all of that either disappears or gets billed hourly at rates the business quietly stops approving. Six months in, the site is out of date. Two years in, it looks older than it is.

A monthly subscription aligns the incentives. We're responsible for the site as long as you're paying — so keeping it fast, current, and correct is our job, not a favour.

What is included

Every plan includes hosting, SSL, updates, a set number of monthly edit requests, uptime and performance monitoring, and analytics. Higher tiers add SEO iterations, more advanced integrations (booking, CRM, payments), and larger monthly change budgets. The full breakdown lives on the pricing page — the point here is that "keeping the site alive and current" is not an add-on.

The site itself is yours. If you leave, you take the code and the content. There's no lock-in beyond the plan you're on.

The economics, plainly

For a company under about 50 people, the numbers tend to work out like this:

• A traditional one-off site: €5,000–€15,000 up front, plus ad-hoc invoices for changes.
• A subscription site: no build cost, a fixed monthly fee, changes included up to a monthly cap.

Over three years the totals are often similar. What differs is the outcome. In the subscription model, the site keeps improving month over month because iteration is the default, not the exception. In the one-off model, the site is best on launch day.

If your team is small, doesn't want to manage a developer relationship on demand, and doesn't want to think about hosting or updates — a subscription is the simpler business decision.

When a subscription is the wrong fit

We tell clients to buy something else in a few cases:

• You have an in-house developer already. You don't need us for the ongoing part. Hire someone to build it, keep them on retainer.
• You want a highly custom web application. A booking marketplace, a SaaS product, a portal with roles and billing. That's a product build, not a website — different pricing model, different scope.
• You want to own the build outright and treat it as a capital expense. Some businesses have accounting reasons for this. We can accommodate it, but it usually costs more in total.

For everyone else — a services company that wants a modern, credible site that keeps getting better without a project meeting every time — subscription is the honest answer.

The quiet advantage

The best thing about the subscription model isn't the pricing. It's that a year in, the site is better than at launch, not worse. Something small gets improved almost every week. New case study, faster page, cleaner form, updated copy. None of it is dramatic. All of it compounds.

That's what we're actually selling — a site that keeps working on your behalf, not a snapshot of what it looked like the day you signed off.