Website subscriptions: what DKK 375–975 a month should include

A website subscription in Denmark typically costs between DKK 200 and 2,000 a month for a small business site. In the DKK 375–975 range you should expect, at minimum: managed hosting in the EU, SSL, software updates, backups, security patching and a defined amount of hands-on help with content changes. If a plan in that band only covers hosting and “we’ll fix it if it breaks”, you are paying for a reseller hosting account with a support inbox attached.

We publish our own plans at DKK 375 a month (Basis) and DKK 975 a month (Vækst), both excluding VAT, so part of this article is first-party data, and we say so where it applies. The rest reflects typical market pricing, which for subscriptions is unusually opaque: most Danish agencies do not publish plans at all, and the ones that do bundle wildly different things under the same word. This guide breaks down what each level should contain, so you can compare offers line by line instead of by price alone.

What a website subscription should include at each level

One thing to settle first, because it decides how you read every table below: does the subscription include the website itself, or only the running of a website you already paid for?

Most market plans are maintenance plans. You bought the site; now you pay to keep it alive. Our plans differ in one specific way: Basis includes the site. Five pages with custom design are part of the DKK 375, not a separate project. That is worth knowing when you compare a DKK 300 maintenance plan with a DKK 375 plan that also builds the site.

With that in mind:

Three observations.

First, the biggest gap in cheap plans is not features, it is posture: reactive versus proactive. A DKK 250 plan that waits for your site to break and then bills by the hour to fix it is a different product from a plan that updates before the exploit reaches you. On WordPress this is not optional. Unpatched plugins remain the single most common way small-business sites get compromised.

Second, hosting location is usually unstated. Since Datatilsynet’s 2022 statement on Google Analytics, and the Chromebook case in Helsingør before it, “where does the data actually live” is a question Danish businesses are expected to be able to answer. Ask for the country and the provider. You should get both in one email.

Third, almost nobody says what happens when you leave. We come back to that below, because it is the question that matters most.

The DKK 375 level: keep it running, keep it safe

At around DKK 375 a month (≈ €50), a subscription should be a complete “it just works” service. Concretely:

• Hosting on named infrastructure. Not “the cloud” as a vague noun. A provider and a country.
• Updates applied on a schedule. CMS, plugins, frameworks, server dependencies, whatever the site runs on.
• Backups you can get a copy of. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a backup. Ask any vendor when they last tested a restore.
• SSL that renews itself. It should be free (Let’s Encrypt). If you are paying for it, ask why.
• A channel for small changes. Swapping an image, fixing a typo, updating opening hours. The volume is small at this level, but it should exist. “Everything is billable” at DKK 375 is a bad deal.

What DKK 375 a month legitimately does not include: redesigns, new features, copywriting and SEO campaigns. A vendor promising those at this price is either overselling or will quietly do none of it.

Our Basis plan at DKK 375 a month is exactly this: five pages with custom design, hosting in the EU included, maintenance, SSL and backup, and content changes as needed. Details are on the pricing page.

The DKK 975 level: maintenance plus actual ongoing work

Around DKK 750–1,000 a month, the service should shift from “keep the lights on” to “keep the site improving”. Everything above, plus:

• Ongoing SEO, both technical and content. Redirects, sitemaps, broken links and structured data kept valid, and text that is actually worked on. Not a one-off setup, but preventing the slow leak of rankings every unmaintained site experiences.
• A blog or content engine that gets used. A site that has not published anything since launch tells Google exactly that.
• Performance tuning. Core Web Vitals degrade as content and scripts accumulate. Someone should be watching and correcting. We have written about why sites get slow.
• Support with a real person at the other end. Not a ticket queue you never hear back from.
• Statistics that stay legal. If your measurement depends on a cookie banner, the banner needs the same upkeep as everything else. nbsweb.dk runs self-hosted, cookieless Umami statistics with no banner at all, which removes an entire category of maintenance work and legal exposure at once. The rules are in cookie banner rules.

That is our Vækst plan at DKK 975 a month: everything in Basis, ongoing technical and content SEO, blog and content engine, performance tuning and support. Above it sits Studio at DKK 8,950 a month for businesses that want a full development team on subscription, which is a different product for a different article.

Six questions that expose a bad plan

Price bands overlap so much that the questions matter more than the number. Send these to any vendor, including us:

1. Where exactly is the site hosted, and in whose account? If you cannot access the hosting account, you have a hostage situation waiting for the day you want to leave.
2. What was updated last month, specifically? A real maintenance operation can answer with a list. A reseller cannot.
3. When did you last restore a backup, and how long did it take?
4. What is included versus billable, in writing? The classic trap is a low monthly fee where every actual task is “outside scope”.
5. Is there a binding period? Twelve months is common and hard to justify for a service that is supposed to prove itself every month. Ours runs month to month.
6. What happens if we cancel? The right answer: you keep your domain, your code, your content and your data, and you get reasonable help moving. Anything else is lock-in priced as convenience.

What happens the day you leave

This is where subscriptions go wrong, and it deserves its own section.

Some agencies build on their own closed platform. The monthly price is low because the site cannot leave with you: cancel, and there is nothing to hand over. You were renting, and nobody used the word. Others build on standard tools but keep the domain, the hosting account or Search Console in their own name, so leaving is possible in theory and painful in practice.

Our position is full handover. Cancel Basis or Vækst and you get the code and the content, the domain is already in your name, and we help you get set up elsewhere, or you take over the hosting yourself. There is no binding period, which means we have to keep being worth the money every month to keep you. We think that is the only honest way to run a subscription. The full checklist for what you should own, and how to check it today, is in do you actually own your website.

Subscription or pay-as-you-go

Paying by the hour (typically DKK 450–900 an hour at Danish agencies) can genuinely be cheaper for a static brochure site you touch twice a year, provided you separately arrange hosting, backups and updates, which most owners never actually do. The failure mode is predictable: nothing is maintained until something breaks in public, and the emergency fix costs more than two years of a subscription.

A subscription makes sense when the site matters commercially: it brings in enquiries or sales, it changes more than a few times a year, or downtime and a security incident would cost real money. At DKK 375–975 a month you are buying insurance, hygiene and a standing relationship with people who already know your site, which is what makes the small changes fast.

One honest caveat about the whole model, ours included: it is only a good deal if you use it. If you have paid for twelve months and never once asked for a change, either the vendor is not keeping you informed or you bought the wrong level. Downgrade, or ask what you have been paying for.

Running costs are half the price of a website

Running costs are the half of the number most businesses never calculate. A DKK 6,995 website with no plan for what happens after launch is not a DKK 6,995 website; it is a DKK 6,995 down payment on unknown future invoices. We break the full build-plus-run sum down in fixed-price websites and the market levels in what a website costs. Our one-time packages, Start at DKK 3,995 and Etablér at DKK 6,995, are designed so you can add Basis afterwards and know the total cost on day one.

If you already have a vendor: send them the six questions above. Their answers will tell you what your subscription actually buys.