Sold out, and the bill nearly doubled

Why the bill grows when things go well

A medicine festival I work with had its best year yet. More people came to the site, more people bought tickets, more people looked at the photos. And the platform the site was built on sent a bigger bill, right when things were going well. Here is how that happens, with the real numbers, and what the same site costs when it runs on its own.

Some website builders, Webflow among them, charge by traffic. Every visit uses a little of it, and every photo uses more. A festival site is quiet for most of the year, and then everyone arrives at once: in the month before the festival and during it, to see the programme and buy tickets.

That month pushed the site past its 50 GB limit and close to 100 GB. So the hosting plan went from 263€ to 466€ a year.

The platform charges more at exactly the moment the festival does well.

The costs nobody mentions at the start

Hosting is only one line. The site also paid for a translation plugin: 150€ a year for up to 10,000 words. With more artists and more editions it was already at 8,500 words, and the next plan costs 299€.

Then the photos. After a few editions the site held almost 6,000 of them, and photographers add more every year. The platform's limit for content was close, and the plan above it has no public price. You ask, and they tell you.

Four editions, added up

That is 3,477€ over four editions. And in the fifth and the sixth, it keeps going up.

What the same site costs on its own

The festival is moving to a site of its own, built with tools that are free at this size:

• Hosting with no traffic limit: 0€.
• A place to edit editions, artists, the programme and projects: 0€.
• The photo archive: 0€ up to 10 GB, and about 1€ a month even with 20,000 photos.
• Translations, inside the site itself: 0€.
• Professional emails like info@ and tickets@, arriving straight in Gmail: 0€.
• Every version of the site saved, so nothing is ever lost: 0€.

The domain stays the same. The festival still pays for its name, and that is all.

The photo archive is the only line that can cost anything, and only because this festival has thousands and thousands of photos. Very few sites ever pass 10,000, and below that it stays at 0€. The other exception is a shop with hundreds of products and variants, where a monthly fee for Shopify pays for itself.

I explained how a site like this is put together, one compartment at a time, in the post about the client I told not to redesign.

A lighter site, too

A site that grows edition by edition collects layers: images bigger than they need to be, old animations, and scripts the platform adds to every page. Rebuilding it keeps only what the site actually uses.

Each photo is sent at the right size for the screen, so a phone never downloads the desktop version. The site opens faster, especially on a phone with a weak signal, and every visit uses less traffic. Google notices, and so do AI assistants when someone asks which festivals to go to in Portugal.

Is it worth it for you?

Some sites are fine where they are. If yours is small, your traffic is steady and the bill never changes, stay, and I will tell you so.

It is worth adding up if:

• ✓Your bill goes up in the months that go well.
• ✓You pay per word to have your site in another language.
• ✓You are close to a limit on photos or pages.
• ✓Your team's emails live in an app you pay for just to reach Gmail.

Add up your own

Every number above came from the festival's invoices. There is a longer version of this thinking in what doing it yourself really costs.