The Number Nobody Quotes You
Website conversations in India focus almost entirely on the build price. A quote of ₹40,000 or ₹1,50,000 gets scrutinised carefully, and then the site launches and a series of smaller recurring costs begin arriving that nobody discussed. Over three years these frequently exceed the original build cost.
This article lists every recurring line item with 2026 India pricing, then gives four realistic annual totals so you can locate yourself. If you are still at the build stage, pair this with our breakdown of what a professional website costs to build.
The Unavoidable Costs
1. Domain renewal — ₹700 to ₹2,500 per year
A .com renews at roughly ₹1,000 to ₹1,500 and a .in somewhat less. Watch two things: first-year promotional pricing that renews much higher, and domain privacy sold as an add-on for ₹300 to ₹800. Set auto-renew on and keep the registrar account in your own name — for why that matters, see our guide on website and domain ownership.
2. Hosting — ₹2,400 to ₹1,80,000 per year
The widest-ranging line item on the list, and the one where businesses most often overpay or underbuy.
| Type | Annual cost | Appropriate for |
|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | ₹2,400 – ₹6,000 | Very low traffic; expect slow response times |
| Managed WordPress | ₹18,000 – ₹60,000 | Most business sites; includes backups and updates |
| Cloud / VPS | ₹48,000 – ₹1,80,000 | Busy stores, portals, custom applications |
| Edge platform (Vercel etc.) | ₹0 – ₹24,000 | Next.js and statically generated sites |
That last row surprises people. A custom site built as static pages can genuinely cost nothing to host at small scale, which materially changes the multi-year economics against WordPress. We cover the architecture behind that in our Next.js and headless CMS write-up.
3. SSL certificate — ₹0 to ₹15,000 per year
Let's Encrypt is free, automated, and cryptographically identical to paid certificates for the purposes of browser trust and Google. Most sites should pay nothing here. Paid certificates are justified for extended validation on financial services or where a specific compliance requirement demands it. If your host is charging ₹4,000 a year for a basic SSL, you are paying for something available free.
4. Business email — ₹1,800 to ₹9,000 per user per year
Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both sit around ₹150 to ₹750 per user per month depending on tier. Zoho Mail is meaningfully cheaper and popular with Indian SMBs. This gets forgotten in website budgets because it feels like a separate thing, but it arrives at the same time and is charged per person, so a team of six is a real number.
The Costs That Depend On Your Platform
5. Premium themes and plugins — ₹0 to ₹40,000 per year
Almost exclusively a WordPress cost, and it accumulates quietly. A page builder licence, an SEO plugin, a forms plugin, a security plugin, a backup plugin, a caching plugin, a slider — each ₹3,000 to ₹8,000 annually, each renewing on its own date.
The trap is that when a licence lapses, the plugin keeps working but stops receiving security updates. Sites get compromised through plugins whose licences expired eighteen months earlier and nobody noticed. Full WordPress budgeting is covered in our WordPress cost guide.
6. Maintenance and support — ₹0 to ₹1,80,000 per year
Agency maintenance retainers in India typically run ₹3,000 to ₹15,000 per month. What they include varies enormously, so get it in writing.
- Basic (₹3,000 – ₹6,000/month): core and plugin updates, weekly backups, uptime monitoring, security scanning.
- Standard (₹6,000 – ₹12,000/month): the above plus a few hours of content changes, performance checks, and priority response.
- Comprehensive (₹12,000+/month): the above plus staging-environment testing, monthly reporting, SEO monitoring, and defined SLA response times.
Ask specifically: how many content-change hours are included, what is the guaranteed response time for a site being down, is there a staging environment, and who owns the backups. Vague answers here reliably become disputes later.
7. Backups — ₹0 to ₹12,000 per year
Some hosts include daily backups; many include only weekly, or store them on the same server, which protects you from your own mistakes but not from the server failing. An independent off-site backup costs ₹500 to ₹1,000 a month and is the cheapest insurance in this entire article.
The Costs Nobody Mentions
- Content updates. Either your time or ₹1,500 to ₹5,000 per hour of someone else's. Businesses that budget zero here end up with a site frozen at launch state.
- Photography and creative refresh. ₹15,000 to ₹1,00,000 every year or two. A site with 2022 product photos looks dated regardless of how good the design is.
- Third-party subscriptions. Chat widget, booking system, email marketing platform, review widget, analytics upgrade. Individually small, collectively ₹10,000 to ₹60,000 a year.
- Payment gateway fees. Roughly 2% per transaction for Indian gateways, plus occasional annual maintenance charges. A variable cost, but a real one.
- Compliance. Privacy policy and terms review as data protection rules evolve, and accessibility work if you serve regulated sectors. Covered in our accessibility guide.
- The rebuild fund. Websites have a working life of roughly three to five years. Setting aside a portion of the eventual replacement cost each year is more sensible than treating it as a surprise.
Four Realistic Annual Totals
| Profile | Setup | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|
| Solo professional / small local business | Static or light WordPress, self-managed, shared or edge hosting | ₹8,000 – ₹20,000 |
| Established SMB | WordPress, managed hosting, premium plugins, basic AMC, 3 mailboxes | ₹55,000 – ₹1,20,000 |
| D2C store | Shopify or WooCommerce, apps, gateway fees, standard AMC, marketing tools | ₹1,20,000 – ₹3,50,000 |
| Custom Next.js business site | Edge hosting, headless CMS, minimal maintenance, 5 mailboxes | ₹25,000 – ₹70,000 |
The fourth row is the one worth studying. A custom-built site frequently costs more upfront and less every year afterwards, because there are no plugin licences, the hosting is cheap or free, and the maintenance burden is genuinely smaller. Over five years the totals often invert.
Where To Cut Safely, and Where Not To
Safe to cut
- Paid SSL when Let's Encrypt does the same job
- Hosting tiers sized for traffic you do not have
- Plugin licences for tools you stopped using
- Overlapping subscriptions — two analytics tools, three form builders
- Domain privacy add-ons where the registrar includes it free
Not safe to cut
- Backups. Recovery without them costs more than a decade of backup fees.
- Security updates. Cleaning a compromised site runs ₹15,000 to ₹75,000 and the search-ranking damage lasts longer than the cleanup.
- Domain renewal. Losing your domain is close to unrecoverable if someone else registers it.
- Hosting quality, below a floor. Saving ₹1,000 a month while losing visitors to slow load times is a bad trade — see our guide on diagnosing slow websites.
Questions To Ask Before Signing Anything
- What is the renewal price, not the promotional price?
- Which recurring costs are included in the build quote and which begin after launch?
- Whose name is on the domain and the hosting account?
- What exactly does the maintenance plan cover, and what is billed extra?
- Where are backups stored, how often, and can I download one myself?
- What happens to all of this if we stop working together?
A vendor who answers these clearly in writing is telling you something reliable about how the rest of the relationship will go.
At Kalex Studio we build on infrastructure that keeps annual running costs low by design — client-owned accounts, edge hosting, and no plugin licence stack to renew. For a written estimate of what your specific site would cost to build and to run each year afterwards, request a proposal.