I have nothing against people on a budget. I understand not being creme-de-la-creme and needing to be careful.
I really boggle at people who want to run a company website, but feel $15/month is ‘too much.’
How much do you spend on your car every month? We’re talking gas, insurance, cleaning, maintenance, and so on. You do that for a reason. You need your car to get you places. It’s an investment in your work. You can’t get to your work without a car so you take care of it to keep it secure, you clean it because it smells, and you pay for insurance in case the worst happens.
Your website is running 24/7 and costs you $15/month and that’s too much for your business? You need to rethink your business model. That’s under $200 a year. That amount of money should be affordable for anyone who’s running a business, even on a shoe-string budget. What really gets me, though, is the person who emailed me saying $200 a year was too much did it from an iPhone. They had the ‘Sent from my iPhone’ signature line still on it. While it’s certainly possible they got a cheap pay-as-you-go plan and a used phone, the reality is they look at the cost and don’t see an immediate value.
Let’s turn this around.
$15 a month is about:
- six gallons of gas (from the Arco down the street)
- five fancy cupcakes from Wildflour Cupcakes
- four grande lattes from Starbucks
- three gallons of milk (probably less in some places)
- two craft beers
- one tin of canned unicorn meat
But we get an immediate value in all those things. We can see the gas, the cupcakes, the unicorn meat, and we see the direct application of our money to a ‘thing.’ A website is different. It is a nebulous entity and floats out there in the cloud. When you’re not selling anything on your website, what’s the point?
Lately I’ve taken to asking people “How much are you planning on spending on advertising a month?” If the answer is ‘nothing’ then I tell them they need to consider it for their company if they plan on getting anywhere. If the answer is a realistic amount, I tell them to allocate $15 a month for webhosting. They need to have a web-presence. It’s 2015, people will want to see who they are, so make a good, informational, site. Don’t put a ‘blog’ up unless there’s a plan to publish to it regularly. Don’t use code you can’t support. Don’t use a host where you can’t get your content back easily (which is really my only issue with things like Wix).
But $15 a month is pennies to the traffic a website can bring you. If you sell three gallons of milk a month, you’ve broken even, after all.
Comments
7 responses to “Cheap Is As Cheap Gets”
Fresh unicorn meat, however, will set you back at least 30$. That’s two sites. Or just one at for some hosting platforms. 🙂
Well put and a perfect objection response when selling a website. This is also great way for helping the customer understand the value.
The people you are describing in this article are not ready for radical change. They are not in a place where things are bad enough to motivate them to change their behavior.
Changing the mindset of someone is only possible if they are willing to accept it. The person who does not realize that their website is a revenue producer, and therefore an investment is close to a lost cause.
These are not your ideal clients. While your thoughts are sound, these arguments will fall on deaf ears in their case. Your energy is probably better spent elsewhere.
@John Locke: True. But.
I refuse to give people bad advice. Or rather, I will not tell you how to do something I think is going to make your life worse. I don’t tell people how to turn off the kses filter for Multisite. I don’t tell people what plugin to use to ‘move the wp-admin/wp-login’ folder. I feel those actions are flatly dangerous and risky.
And I won’t work with someone who’s unwilling to learn from the expert they’ve hired. It’s part of why I was ‘unsuccessful’ as a consultant. If you hired me, you hired me to be the expert for a reason. I’m not a YES man. I’m going to be honest, even when I tell you that my product is not right for you. Because I respect people and feel they desert honesty and the truth.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to sit down and try to talk to them and explain the reality to them. They shouldn’t have to be in a ‘bad’ place for them to be open to learning. That’s a horrible place to learn from. And that’s part of my point. It’s our job, as the experts, to teach them what’s wrong (or shortsighted) and why. If we don’t, if we are unwilling to teach, then the problems are what we deserve for not doing what we knew was right.
@Ipstenu (Mika Epstein): That comment deserves a post on it’s own. It’s a great perspective. You could save people from having to learn it the hard way.
@Ipstenu (Mika Epstein): I could not agree more!
I enjoyed reading this article. So true, a cheap mindset, will get you cheap results.