The hidden costs of 'free' website platforms

By: , tS-X

“Build your own website for free.” “From €2.99 per month.” “No technical knowledge needed.”

You know the promises. They’re on every bus stop and in every YouTube ad. And they’re true — technically speaking. You can put a website online for a few euros per month. Just like you can get a business card printed at the supermarket for a few euros.

But would you hand that business card to a potential client?

The €2.99 bait

The website builder industry has a transparency problem. Advertised prices are designed to generate clicks, not to inform you. A business owner who budgets based on “€2.99 per month” will have spent multiples of that within 12 months — often without understanding why.

Here’s how it works:

Within six months you’re paying €30 to €50 per month for something that started as “free.” And your site is still slow, generic, and not yours.

The costs that don’t appear on the invoice

The monthly subscription fees are the visible part. The real costs are invisible:

Time

Every business owner who has ever built a DIY website knows the feeling: hours disappear into adjusting a template that doesn’t quite do what you want. Buttons that won’t sit in the right place. Colours that don’t match. A mobile version that looks different than expected.

Those hours aren’t a hobby. They’re hours you’re not spending on your customers, your product, or your sales. If you calculate your own hourly rate — even a modest €50 per hour — and you spend 20 hours on your website, you’ve invested €1,000 worth of time. For a site that looks like a thousand others.

Missed customers

A slow site costs you 7% conversion per second of delay. A site without a clear call-to-action loses 60% of mobile visitors. A site that looks unprofessional gets rejected within 50 milliseconds by your visitor’s primal brain.

These aren’t theoretical losses. These are customers going to your competitor. Every month. Structurally. And you don’t see it, because there’s no error message — only silence.

The switching bill

This is where it gets truly painful. Research in the SEO industry shows that an unprofessional platform migration can lead to an immediate loss of 20% to 40% of your organic search traffic, with recovery often taking many months. And in the worst case, your search visibility never fully recovers.

This means: if after two years you decide your platform no longer meets your needs and you want to switch, you risk losing months of built-up search visibility. Unless the migration is executed technically correctly — with 301 redirects that tell Google where your pages have moved. Something a professional handles for you, but something a DIY platform doesn’t offer when you leave.

The plugin trap

For business owners building their own WordPress site, the cost picture is even grimmer. WordPress works with plugins — extensions that add functionality — and that’s where the trap lies:

And every plugin is a potential security vulnerability. In 2025, more than 11,000 vulnerabilities were discovered in WordPress plugins (Patchstack, 2025). Every plugin you add increases your attack surface.

With Wix and Squarespace they’re not called plugins but ‘apps’ or ’extensions’ — the principle is the same: basic features are sold separately.

It’s like buying a car where the doors, steering wheel, and brakes are sold separately. And every month you have to pay to have them updated, or they fall off.

What “free” actually means

Let’s be honest about what you get for “free”:

What they promise What you get
Free website A subdomain (yourbusiness.platform.com)
Professional design A template that 10,000 others also use
No technical knowledge needed No control over technical quality
Everything included Only basic features; the rest is premium
Your site is yours You’re renting a space; stop paying and everything is gone

The revenue model is simple: get you in for free, make you dependent, and then charge bit by bit for everything you actually need. It’s not a service — it’s a trap.

The real costs over 3 years

Let’s make it concrete. A typical business owner on a DIY platform pays over 3 years:

Total visible costs: €1,080–€2,520. Total including your own hours: €10,000+.

For a website that’s slow, not secure, not yours, and looks the same as your competitor’s.

The alternative exists

A professional website that’s fast, secure, and fully in your ownership — that doesn’t have to cost a fortune. It doesn’t have to take months either. And most importantly: you pay once for quality, instead of paying for years for mediocrity.

The question isn’t “can I do it myself?” The question is: “what does it cost me to keep doing it myself?”

Curious how your website performs? Try the free website check.

Matt ten Seldam helps business owners with fast, secure and findable websites via tS-X.