Hidden Costs of a Cheap Website in Singapore

Short answer: a S$699 to S$1,999 website in Singapore is the launch price, not the price. Hosting, domain renewal, plugin licences, maintenance hours and the rebuild when it stops working add an estimated S$1,000 to S$2,000 a year from year two. Over 5 years a S$899 site can cost more than 3 times a S$2,000 site that carries S$0 hosting and S$0 maintenance.

Published figures below are from each company's own pages, checked 18 October 2026. Totals are our estimates and are labelled as such.

What does the launch price leave out?

Published low-price packages: Innomedia from S$699, SG Web Builder at S$899 for 1 page and S$1,499 to S$1,999 for 5 to 8 pages, and Design Magic at S$97 a month for a one-page site. What each price covers is in cheap website design in Singapore.

The items usually outside the price:

• Copy. You write it. Singapore Best Web Design states it does not provide copywriting or photography. WE Interactive publishes S$250 to S$600 a page when an agency does.
• Photos. Stock images, or your phone.
• SEO setup. Titles, descriptions, schema and a Search Console property are rarely in a S$899 scope.
• Email. Google Workspace Business Starter is S$9.40 per user a month, S$338 a year for 3 people.
• Redirects. For an existing site, a redirect map for every indexed URL.
• Edit rounds. The count is often unstated. Extra rounds are billed.
• Ownership. Who holds the domain, hosting account and code is usually not written down.

What do years two onwards cost?

Free periods end. These are the published year-two figures.

Estimate for a S$899 WordPress site in year two: S$645 hosting and domain, 4 maintenance sessions at S$80 (S$320), 2 paid plugins at about US$79 each (about S$200), and 3 mailboxes (S$338). About S$1,500, or 1.7 times the launch price, every year. The website maintenance cost guide breaks down the maintenance line.

What does a site you do not own cost?

Ownership is 4 things: domain, code, hosting account and enquiry data. A cheap package often keeps 2 or 3 of them with the provider.

• Domain registered by the provider. You cannot move the site without their cooperation, and a lapsed renewal takes the site down.
• Code you cannot export. Wix states in its help centre that a site must be hosted on Wix's servers. Leaving means rebuilding.
• Hosting on the provider's account. You pay the renewal they set. Exabytes' entry plan rises from S$16.99 to S$66.99 a month after the introductory term, and a reseller adds a margin.
• Leads in a third-party form tool. Your enquiry history sits under that tool's terms and plan limits.

The cost of each is the same: a second build. Published revamp prices start at S$1,500 to S$4,000 for a simple SME site at Innomedia. A site you own can be moved for the cost of a hosting change.

What does the rebuild cost when it stops working?

Cheap sites are usually WordPress with a theme and 10 to 20 plugins. Patchstack logged 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, 91% in plugins, with 46% unpatched at disclosure. An unmaintained plugin-heavy site is a cleanup bill waiting for a date.

• Malware removal: SG Web Builder publishes from S$500, one-time.
• A site that fails Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds (LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, CLS of 0.1 or less) on a heavy theme is rarely fixed by tuning. The fix is a rebuild.
• Rebuild prices: simple revamp S$1,500 to S$4,000 at Innomedia; new builds from S$2,500 at Singapore Best Web Design and S$3,000 at OOm.
• Timing: Mapletree Media recommends a revamp every 2 to 3 years. On that schedule a 5-year horizon holds at least one rebuild.

5-year cost table: cheap build vs fixed-price build

Our estimate, using the published figures above. Each column assumes a 5 to 8 page business site, 3 mailboxes excluded from all columns since email costs the same regardless of builder, and no new features.

Two readings of the table:

• The S$899 site and the S$2,500 package land within S$100 of each other over 5 years. The launch price was 12% of one total and 32% of the other.
• The lines that separate the third column are hosting, maintenance and plugins, not the build. Ask every provider for those 3 figures at year two before comparing build prices.

What cense does

cense builds in Next.js on Vercel or Google Cloud with no plugins, so hosting is S$0 on the standard plan for most business sites and maintenance is S$0 a month. The client owns the domain, code, hosting and data. See website maintenance in Singapore.