How Much Does a Small Business Website Actually Cost to Run?

Most small business sites don't need a monthly hosting bill at all. Here's what actually costs money once your site gets real traffic, and what stays free.

Every small business owner I've talked to assumes a "real" website comes with a monthly hosting bill — $20, $50, sometimes more, before you've added a single feature. For a storefront, a booking form, and a handful of pages, that's usually money left on the table.

What's actually free

Cloudflare, Vercel, and a few other providers give away enough compute, database, and storage for most small-business traffic levels at no cost — not a "free trial," an ongoing free tier. Navarro Co is a live example: a storefront, a staff back office, and an AI-assisted intake flow, all served from one Cloudflare Worker, with no monthly infrastructure bill. The free tier isn't a toy — the limits are generous enough that a typical local business won't come close to hitting them.

That's the pattern across a lot of the small-scale, real-world sites I build: static assets, a serverless API, a small database (D1, Turso, or similar), and object storage for images. None of it needs a server sitting idle 24/7 waiting for traffic, so none of it needs to be paid for 24/7 either.

What isn't free — and shouldn't be skipped

Free infrastructure doesn't mean a free website. The costs that are actually worth budgeting for:

• A domain name. Small, recurring, unavoidable.
• A real email service if you're sending transactional mail (order confirmations, contact form replies) — free tiers here are usually enough for low volume, but it's a separate account from your hosting.
• Bot and spam protection on public forms (Turnstile or similar) — free to add, but easy to forget until your inbox fills with junk submissions.
• Someone to build and maintain it. This is the part that actually costs money, and it should — infrastructure being free doesn't mean the engineering is.

Where the bill shows up later

The free tier stops being free when you outgrow it: high image-heavy traffic, background jobs that run constantly instead of on-demand, or a database that grows past the free storage cap. None of that is a reason to over-provision on day one — it's a reason to build on infrastructure that scales into a bill gradually, instead of committing to one upfront.

The takeaway

If a freelancer or agency is quoting you a $30–100/month "hosting fee" for a low-traffic business site, ask what it's actually paying for. In a lot of cases the honest answer is "nothing yet" — and you're paying for hosting you don't need rather than the work that matters.

If you want a second opinion on what your site should actually cost to run, see how I approach this or get in touch.