A British couple running a language academy in El Carmen sent us two offers side by side. One from a UK agency: a monthly plan, "everything included, cancel any time". One from a studio in Valencia: a single price, then nothing. "Website subscription vs one-time payment, which is actually cheaper? The monthly one looks like less money." It looks like less money for about a year. After that the picture flips, and the part that matters is not the money anyway. Here is how to do the sum with your own numbers, and the cases where the subscription genuinely wins.
What you pay once and what you pay every year
The one-time work is design, build, structuring your texts, basic SEO, the Spanish legal texts, the WhatsApp button. Done properly, it does not need paying again. Two things renew every year regardless of who built the site: the domain, which is your address, and the hosting, which is the server the page lives on. Both are small next to the build and both are paid directly to the provider, not to a studio.
So "one-time payment" means one thing precisely: nobody charges you for the fact that the site exists. You pay for the address and the server, the way you pay for a PO box. Everything else is yours.
What a subscription really is
The "X per month, all included" model comes in three shapes. Site builders like Wix or Squarespace: you assemble the page, pay the platform monthly, and the site lives while you pay. Agencies on retainer, common in the UK and increasingly in Spain: a cheap or "free" build, then a monthly "maintenance" fee, and a contract that says the site remains theirs. And freelancers or phone operators who "take care of hosting" and bill you monthly with a margin, with the domain registered in their name.
In all three the question is the same. What happens the day you stop paying? If the answer is "the site goes away", you have not bought a website. You are renting one, together with the address already printed on your flyers and listed on Google Maps.
The three-year table
Put your monthly fee in the left column.
| Subscription | One-time (Landing Express) | |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | 12 × monthly fee | 290 EUR + domain and hosting renewal |
| Year 2 | another 12 × fee | domain and hosting only |
| Year 3 | another 12 × fee | domain and hosting only |
| What you hold after 3 years | nothing, if you stop paying | the site, the code, the domain, your Google history |
Multiply your monthly fee by thirty-six and set it against 290 EUR plus three renewals of domain and hosting. In most offers clients show us, the subscription is already the dearer option in year two. From year four the gap only widens, because the one-time payment has ended and the subscription never does.
The part that is not about money
Businesses move. The academy in El Carmen may move to Ruzafa, or back to Bristol. A site you own moves with you: same domain, same Google history, new hosting if you like. A subscription site stays with the platform, and the address your students know goes dark if you cancel. For a business run by people who may not stay in one place, ownership is worth more than the yearly difference.
When a subscription is the better choice
We say this because it is sometimes true. If you change content every week and never want to touch code, a builder with an editor is comfortable and the fee buys convenience. If you run an online shop with stock, shipping and returns, a subscription platform is usually the only sensible route, and we do not build those. If your business is three weeks old and you are testing an idea, a free builder plan is the right start; do not buy a site from anyone until you have paying customers. And if you want someone to make every change for you, a monthly maintenance contract is fair, as long as it says the site is yours and you can leave with it.
Three questions for any offer
Useful whether or not you write to us. Whose name is the domain registered in? Where does the code live and do I get a copy? What happens the day after I stop paying? If any of the three gets a vague answer, the subscription is hiding a lease.
If you are already paying monthly
Do not cancel on the day the plan ends. First get the domain into your own name, or find out whether it can be transferred. Launch the new site on your domain, check that the WhatsApp button and the form work and that Google sees the new page. Only then close the subscription. The content of a one-page site moves in an afternoon; we only need the link to the old one.
How Skyba Tech does it
A landing page is 290 EUR without IVA, once. We set up the domain and hosting, but in your name, and you renew them directly. You get the code. We have no monthly fee. We build on Next.js, with no WordPress and no plugins, so the "maintenance" of updating plugins so you do not get hacked does not exist; there is nothing to break. If you want a change in a year, it is a small job with a fixed price, not a retainer. Landing Pro is 690 EUR, a corporate site from 1.290 EUR, a chatbot on the site from 590 EUR, also with no monthly fee. A third to a half upfront, the rest after launch.
The academy chose the one-time build and kept the UK agency's quote as a bookmark for what three years would have cost.
Have a monthly offer on the table? Send it to us on WhatsApp and in ten minutes we will tell you what it costs over three years and which parts of it would be yours.