The page builder tax

Let us do the arithmetic that nobody does out loud.

A typical hosted page builder for a small business runs somewhere between thirty and a few hundred dollars a month depending on how many features got switched on. Call it eighty. That is nine hundred and sixty dollars a year, forever, for a site that changes twice.

For that you get hosting, which genuinely costs a few dollars a month at this size. You get an editor, which you used heavily for two weeks and have not opened since. And you get a support line, which is real value if you use it.

What you also get, and what is never on the invoice:

Your site is not portable. The pages exist inside their system. Moving means rebuilding. That is the actual product being sold, and the monthly fee is the smaller half of it.

Your speed is theirs. You cannot fix the page weight, because you do not control the output. Every site on the platform carries the same overhead.

Your ceiling is their roadmap. When you need something the builder does not do, the answer is a plugin, and the plugin is another subscription, and now three vendors have to agree for your contact form to work.

I am not against paying for software. I pay for plenty. I am against paying rent on an asset you could own, which is what this is.

The alternative for a small business site is a folder of files on a CDN. Hosting is free at this traffic level or close to it. The domain is thirty a year. When you want a change you call somebody, and the change costs what an hour costs, and you probably want two changes a year.

The nine hundred and sixty dollars stays in the business. Over five years that is the price of a truck wrap and a good camera.