What is your monthly actually for?

The cheapest thing in the box ends up naming the box

Ask a business owner what their monthly is for and you'll usually get one word back. Hosting. Bookkeeping. The service plan. Maintenance. One word, and it's almost always the name of the cheapest, most commoditised thing in the bundle.

Then, because they've got a one word label on it, they do the sensible thing and find out what that one word costs on its own. Hosting costs almost nothing. So the monthly looks outrageous, and it stays looking outrageous no matter how much is actually inside it.

I want to be careful with this, because the lazy version of this article is a supplier complaining that customers don't appreciate them. That's not it. If you tell somebody they're buying hosting, they're going to price hosting, and they're right to. The label was wrong before the comparison was.

So rather than write about that in the abstract and let it stay comfortable, here's ours. What our clients actually pay for, month to month, at each level of involvement. No prices, because prices depend on the business and the number isn't the point of this piece. What's inside is.

Every monthly holds four kinds of thing

This holds up across every recurring invoice I've ever looked at, in any industry, and it's the vocabulary the rest of this piece uses.

Infrastructure is what has to keep running whether anybody touches it or not. Somewhere for the site to sit, a phone number, a licence that stops working the day it lapses. It's cheap, it's a commodity, and it's nearly always the word people use to name the whole bill.

Tools are the software the work gets done in. Somebody's paying for those, and if it isn't in your monthly it's a card payment you may have forgotten about.

Attention is somebody noticing. Not doing anything, noticing. That something broke, that a number moved, that a message came in on a Sunday. It's the hardest one to value, because when it's working you never see it and the only evidence is the absence of a disaster.

And work is the hours. Somebody changed something, wrote something, built something. It's the only one of the four most people intuitively accept they should pay for, which is why it's the one suppliers should be describing and mostly aren't.

The base level: the site and the system are looked after

This is where most people start, and it's the one that gets called hosting.

You have a website, and attached to it you have a CRM, so an enquiry that arrives on the site becomes a record rather than an email that gets lost. The site runs on cloud infrastructure that we pay for. The CRM licence and its usage, up to a normal amount of it, we pay for too. Those two things alone are most of what people picture, and they're the smallest part of the bill.

Then there's the part that only exists because somebody's watching. The framework the site is built on ships updates, and some of those are security patches for vulnerabilities that get publicly announced, which means the window between the announcement and the patch being applied is a window anybody can look up. Applying those isn't something you should have to think about or even hear about. It just happens.

We also notice things. That a page got slower, that a form stopped sending, that something in the way people move through the site isn't working the way it was meant to. Nobody reports those, because the person they'd report them to is you and you're on the tools.

And then the small stuff, which is the part clients actually feel. A phone number changes. An email address changes. A price on a service page is out of date, a staff member leaves, an hours change over Christmas. You send a message, it gets done, and there's no quote and no minimum and no conversation about whether it's in scope.

Add content and search, and you're buying research

The next level up is where somebody starts actively working on being found, and the honest description of it is research more than writing.

Before a single article gets written, the work is finding out what people in your area actually type when they want what you sell, which is almost never the words the industry uses internally. That determines the shape of the site: which pages exist at all, how they're grouped, what sits under what. It's why a site map is a strategic document and not a list of pages, and why building the pages first and thinking about search afterwards produces a site that has to be rebuilt.

Out of that comes the content pillars, the handful of subjects the business should be the obvious answer on, and then the resource articles that fill them in. Each one is written to answer one question properly, because that's what gets found and it's also, incidentally, what gets quoted by the AI answers that increasingly sit above the search results. There's more on that in How to get cited by AI→.

This is the level where the monthly stops being about keeping something alive and starts being about it getting better every month whether or not anybody asks.

Add advertising, and you're buying somebody in the account twice a day

Advertising is the level where the attention category stops being abstract, because an ad account left alone doesn't stay the same, it degrades.

We're in the accounts twice a day. On the search side, a lot of that is reading what people actually typed to trigger your ads, which is never the same list as the keywords you're bidding on, and adding the ones that shouldn't have matched as negatives. That list is where money quietly leaks, and it only gets found by somebody sitting down and reading it.

The rest is optimising toward the right number rather than the flattering one. Cost per click is easy to move and mostly meaningless. Cost per acquisition is the real one, and even that isn't the end of it, because the jobs a business quotes aren't worth the same as each other. Once we know which work is actually worth having, and which suburbs it comes from, the account gets pointed at that instead of at whatever produces the most enquiries. Optimising for the count of leads and optimising for the quality of the job are different settings, and most accounts are on the first one by default.

That's the same argument as Teaching Google what a good customer looks like→, and it's the single biggest difference between an account that's managed and one that's merely running.

And at the top, you've handed the whole thing over

Some businesses want to stop thinking about marketing entirely, and at that level the monthly buys something quite different: we're end to end, and a good chunk of what we do isn't marketing at all.

The ads run, the CRM is managed, the site keeps growing. But the interesting part is the building. If you've outsourced this completely, we've almost certainly built you software, because the thing slowing your business down usually isn't demand. A delivery driver with an app on their phone that marks a job done, which drops straight back into the CRM and sends the customer a message on your behalf, without anybody in the office typing anything. A tracking tool for something you're currently keeping in your head. Small, specific, unglamorous things that take a job off somebody.

None of those come from a brief. They come from sitting at the desk with you, listening to what you've noticed and saying what we've noticed, and one of us going that could just be automated. That's the actual product at this level, and it's the hardest one to put on an invoice, which is exactly the problem this whole article is about.

The number that actually decides this

Here's where I think most people get stuck, and it isn't on the price. It's that a monthly is a number you can see and everything it produces is a number you can't, so the comparison happens on the only side with figures on it.

So the more useful question isn't what does it cost. It's what would it have to return before you stopped thinking about the cost at all.

Work out what one job is worth to you. Not the biggest one you've ever done, the ordinary one, the one you'd quote on a Tuesday. Now ask how many extra of those a year would cover the whole arrangement. For most trade and service businesses I've done this with, the answer lands somewhere between one and three, and once somebody's said that number out loud the conversation stops being about the monthly.

Then the other half, which people undercount badly. How many hours a month is this taking off you, and what is an hour of yours actually worth? Not what you pay someone else, what you'd earn using that hour on the work you're good at. The owner writing their own website copy at nine at night is the most expensive copywriter in the country.

And the one nobody costs at all: the enquiry that came in on Sunday and got answered on Wednesday. That's not a marketing problem, it's an operating one, and it's usually already happening before anybody signs anything.

Which level you should be at

Honestly, it's whichever one matches how much of this you want to think about, and there's no correct answer to that.

Plenty of good businesses should sit at the base level for years. The site is looked after, enquiries land somewhere real, and the owner keeps running their own marketing because they're good at it and they enjoy it. That's a completely legitimate place to stop, and I'd rather somebody sat there happily than bought a level they don't have the appetite to be involved in.

The move up usually happens for one of two reasons. Either the work stopped arriving on its own and something has to actively go and find it, or it's still arriving and there's no longer enough of the owner to go around. Those are different problems and they point at different levels.

The thing I'd avoid is deciding it in the abstract. It's a twenty minute conversation about what your year looks like and where the bottleneck actually is, and the answer is usually obvious to both of us by the end of it.