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Last updated: August 2026
The in-house cost nobody writes down
"We handle the website ourselves" almost always means one of three people is doing it: the owner (whose hour is worth the most in the business and is spent watching a plugin update bar), the office manager or a marketing person (learning by breaking, with no backup when they leave), or "my nephew's good with computers" (no comment needed, we clean up after this one weekly).
Run the honest math: a website needs 3-5 hours of monthly routine care done properly. At a $50/hr loaded cost for whoever does it, that's $150-$250/month for the routine alone, before the incidents. And incidents are where in-house really pays: a white-screen or a hacked site consumes 4-20 hours of an untrained person's time versus 1-3 hours of a specialist's, and it happens at the worst possible moment because that's when traffic is highest.
What each option really includes
| In-house (assigned staff) | Freelancer on-call | Maintenance service | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $150-$1,500 hidden labor | $0 base + $50-100/hr | $49-$300 flat |
| 24×7 monitoring | Almost never | No | Standard |
| Response at 2 a.m. | No | Rarely | Yes (that's the product) |
| Skill depth | One person's ceiling | One person's ceiling | Team across specialties |
| Vacation/quit risk | High | High | None |
| Incident cost | High (slow diagnosis) | Hourly, unbounded | Included or flat-quoted |
| Knowledge of your business | Best | Good | Grows over months |
When in-house genuinely wins
Be fair to the other side: keep it in-house if you employ a real developer with actual spare hours (not a designer told to "also do the website"), your site is a complex custom application only insiders understand, or the website is genuinely low-stakes, a brochure page whose downtime costs nothing. Also: content publishing should often stay in-house even when technical care is outsourced. Nobody outsources knowing your customers.
The hybrid most businesses land on
The pattern that works: outsource the technical layer (updates, security, backups, monitoring, fixes) for a flat fee, keep the content layer (posts, product updates, promotions) in-house, and use the service's included edit hours for the awkward middle (banner swaps, layout tweaks, form changes). Your team does what only they can do; the 3 a.m. pager belongs to someone paid to hold it.
Any provider you consider should make this easy to test: month-to-month terms, a defined onboarding, and a written response SLA. Ours is 12 minutes average first response, from $49/mo, cancel anytime, the economics work because a distributed senior team spreads its cost across many sites, which is a structural advantage no single in-house hire can match.
FAQ
We have an IT person, isn't the website their job? IT and web are different trades. Your IT person manages devices, networks and accounts; WordPress security, Core Web Vitals and WooCommerce debugging are a separate skill tree. Many of our clients have IT staff, who were relieved to hand the website off.
Isn't outsourcing risky? They'll have access to everything. Manage it like any vendor: least-privilege access, credentials in a password manager the business owns, an NDA, and a documented offboarding. That's safer than the common in-house reality, every password in one employee's head.
What if we outgrow the outsourced plan? Growth usually means more edit hours or an e-commerce tier, not a new model, until you're big enough to hire a full web team, at which point the service hands over cleanly. Month-to-month terms make the transition free.
Can we start in-house and switch later? You can, but note the asymmetry: starting outsourced and bringing it in-house later transfers a documented, healthy site. Starting in-house and outsourcing later usually begins with a cleanup invoice for the accumulated neglect.
Still comparing? Here is our honest pitch
Full-scope website maintenance from $49/mo: 24x7 monitoring, security, updates, backups, speed work and monthly edits. Month to month, cancel anytime, and we will tell you if another provider fits you better.