What's actually included in a €100/month website vs a one-off build

Comparing a €100/month website to a one-off build by monthly cost alone misses the point of the comparison. The right question is not which option is cheaper. It is what each option actually gives you, because the two are not the same product at different prices. They are different products entirely.

Key takeaways

• A one-off build gets you a website; a monthly subscription typically bundles hosting, booking, payments, updates, and support
• The one-off option leaves you responsible for sourcing and maintaining the tools around the site yourself
• DIY maintenance time, plugin updates, and "who do I call when this breaks" are hidden costs that rarely show up in the upfront price
• Over three years, a managed monthly service and a one-off build plus the tools you'd need to add can land at a similar total cost, but with very different levels of ongoing support

What a one-off build actually gets you

A one-off build, like our own €399-499 simple website option, gets you exactly what the name suggests: a professionally built website, live and yours from day one. For a therapist who genuinely only needs a credible online presence, no booking system, no payments, this is a sensible and complete answer. It converts visitors into enquiries and that is the whole job it is designed to do.

What it does not include is everything around the website: booking, payment collection, ongoing updates, hosting management, or someone to call when a plugin breaks or a form stops working. Those are separate problems, left for you to solve separately, at whatever cost that takes in money or time.

What's bundled into a subscription setup

Our Standard tier, at €100/month or €2,999-3,000 upfront, is built around a different assumption: that most therapists want the website, the booking system, and the payment processing to function as one connected system rather than three separate things they have to stitch together and maintain.

That means the site itself, online booking, card payments, client intake built into the booking flow, and ongoing technical support are all part of the one price. If a form breaks, if a plugin needs updating, if you want a page changed, that is covered by the subscription rather than requiring you to find and pay someone again. A client organiser add-on, €20/month for the first 12 months, extends this into the day-to-day admin of tracking leads and scheduling, the kind of thing that otherwise ends up scattered across a notebook, a spreadsheet, and your email inbox.

None of this includes GDPR compliance itself, which is a legal obligation rather than something any provider can sell you, or a dedicated platform for clinical session notes, which is a separate system we help you set up as part of onboarding. Those two things sit outside what any website, ours included, is responsible for.

The hidden cost of "cheap now"

The one-off build's lower upfront price is real. What is less visible upfront is what happens in month four, when you need a booking system added, or month nine, when a plugin update breaks your contact form, or month fourteen, when you realise you have spent several evenings you didn't have trying to fix something you don't fully understand.

DIY maintenance time is the single biggest hidden cost in a "cheap now" website. Every hour spent troubleshooting a broken form, updating software, or figuring out why a booking widget stopped working is an hour not spent with clients, and for a therapist billing €90-120 per session, that time has a real opportunity cost even when no invoice for it ever arrives.

There is also the more basic risk of simply not knowing who to call. A one-off build from a freelancer or agency is typically a single transaction. Once it is delivered, ongoing support is usually a new, separate cost, if the original builder is even still reachable.

A simple total-cost comparison over three years

The totals land in a similar range. The difference is what is inside that total: in the subscription, the ongoing support and the booking and payment infrastructure are already paid for and already working together. In the one-off route, that same money and time gets spent reactively, tool by tool, problem by problem, as they come up.

If you only need a simple site with no booking or payments, the one-off build is the right, honest answer. If you want the website, booking, payments, and support to function as one system from day one, see the full Standard and Clinic pricing.