A website has a price and a website has a running cost, and the quote you get almost never shows you the second one. That is how a $950 site becomes a surprise in month thirteen.

So here is the complete list of what a Dominican business website costs to keep running, what each item should roughly be, what is included in a reasonable arrangement, and the line items you should refuse to pay for.

What you genuinely have to pay for

Four things. Everything else on this page is optional or should be included.

Your domain. Roughly $20 to $50 a year, depending on the name. A plain `.com` sits at the low end; a short, desirable or previously-owned name costs more, and some extensions are priced higher than others. This is paid to a registrar, not to your developer, and it should be registered in your name on an account you control.

Hosting. For a site built the way we build them — static pages served from a global network rather than a server running software — hosting is around $20 a month. It is not the biggest cost and it is the one most often marked up.

Maintenance. Updates, backups, security, and small content changes. Ours is $95 a month, and the first year is included in the build price. You can also do none of this, which is free until it is extremely expensive.

Business email on your own domain. A few dollars per user per month from whichever provider you choose. Check current pricing directly — it changes and it varies by region. What matters is that `info@yourbusiness.com` is a real cost and people forget to budget it.

That is the floor. Domain plus hosting plus email, with no maintenance at all, is a modest annual figure. With maintenance it is the largest running item.

What should be included and is sometimes charged anyway

Watch for these on an invoice.

SSL. The padlock. Free certificates have been standard for years. If someone is charging you an annual fee for basic SSL on a normal business site, ask why.

Backups. Should be part of maintenance, not a separate subscription.

Analytics. Google Analytics is free. So is Search Console.

A CDN. For most Dominican business sites this is included in modern hosting rather than bought separately. We wrote about whether you need one at all.

Small content changes. Changing a price, a photograph or your hours should not be billed by the hour under a maintenance agreement. If it is, you will stop asking, and then your site will be out of date.

What you should refuse to pay for

This is the part that saves real money.

"AI SEO" packages, AI text files, or special markup to get you into AI answers. Google's own documentation is explicit: there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, you do not need special schema.org markup, and you do not need new machine-readable files or AI text files. This is being sold in the Dominican market right now.

Directory submission services. "We will list you in 500 directories" has not been useful for many years.

Monthly SEO with no named deliverables. If the invoice does not say what was produced, you are buying a report.

Premium plugin licences on a site that does not use plugins. If your site is hand-built, there is nothing to license. If it is WordPress, know which licences you are paying for and why.

A separate charge for "mobile optimisation." A site that does not work on a phone is not finished. In the Dominican Republic especially — the Oficina Nacional de Estadística's ENHOGAR-MICS 2025 survey found 89.4% of households own a smartphone against 32.3% owning any computer, laptop or tablet.

The costs that depend on what you sell

These are real, variable, and worth modelling before you commit.

Payment processing. If you take payments, a percentage of every transaction goes to the processor, plus sometimes a fixed fee per transaction. Local processors and international ones price differently and the gap matters at volume. Get the actual rate in writing for your business type before you build a checkout.

Booking or reservation software. If you use a third-party booking engine, that is a monthly or per-booking cost that sits outside your website bill entirely.

Email marketing. Free up to a few hundred contacts with most providers, then priced by list size.

Photography. Not monthly, but it recurs. Menus change, rooms get refurbished, staff change.

What happens if you pay for nothing at all

A fair question, since we have just told you maintenance is the largest running item. What actually breaks if you pay only for the domain and hosting?

Nothing, for a while. Then, in rough order:

Your content goes stale. Prices from two seasons ago, a service you stopped offering, holiday hours from last year. This costs you customers silently — nobody writes to tell you your page is wrong, they just go elsewhere.

The site gets slower. Images accumulate, third-party scripts pile up, and dependencies age. The site you launched fast drifts slower while Google's expectations move the other way.

Something breaks and nobody notices. A contact form stops delivering, a payment integration expires, a plugin conflicts after an update. The worst version is the form that silently stops arriving, because your enquiries drop and the site looks fine.

And eventually the domain renewal email goes to an address nobody reads. We found 22% of Dominican restaurants had a dead or expired website or menu link, and an unrenewed domain is one of the ways that happens.

If $95 a month is genuinely not available, the minimum viable version is: set a calendar reminder every quarter, submit your own contact form, check your prices, and confirm the domain renewal card is current. That is free and it catches most of the above.

The cost nobody puts on a spreadsheet

The site that was cheap and then had to be rebuilt.

If your site lives inside a hosting company's own builder, there is usually nothing to export — the pages exist as rows in their system. The day you outgrow it, you are not migrating a website, you are paying full price for a new one and retyping every page. We wrote about the real cost of a free website from your hosting company separately, because it is the single most expensive "saving" we see in this market.

The same applies to a domain registered in somebody else's name. That is not a monthly cost until the month you need to move and cannot.

How to audit your own running costs this week

Three steps, about twenty minutes.

1. List every recurring charge connected to your website: domain, hosting, email, maintenance, plugins, subscriptions, any monthly SEO.

2. For each one, write down what it produces. If you cannot say, that is your answer.

3. Check who the domain is registered to. If it is not you, fix that before anything else.

Then compare the total against what the site brings in. For many Dominican businesses the honest finding is that the running costs are modest and the real problem is that the site is not doing anything — which is a different fix, and usually starts with the Google listing rather than with spending more.

What we charge, stated plainly

Our standard bilingual business website is $950 and a landing page is $400. The first year of hosting and maintenance is included. After that, maintenance is $95 a month and hosting is around $20 a month. Your domain is billed separately by the registrar, in your name, at roughly $20 to $50 a year depending on the name — we help you look one up. Spanish and English are included; two further languages are $200. Payment is 50% to start and 50% on completion, with two rounds of revisions, and a standard build runs four to six weeks.

The full breakdown of what the build price buys is published rather than quoted on request, and so is what happens after launch.

If you want someone to go through your current running costs and tell you which ones are doing nothing, DR Web Studio works with businesses across the Dominican Republic — send us a message.