What is a website as a service — and what it costs in year two

Website as a service (WaaS) is an industry term for a business model: an agency or a studio builds websites for clients and then keeps them running — hosting, updates, security, small content changes — for a monthly fee, instead of handing over a site and a bill for the build.

The phrase is used almost entirely inside the agency world, and the pages that rank for it are agency pages: the model's advocates, the tools built to run it, and the guides on selling websites on a subscription. So the useful answer is not only a definition. It is a comparison — because whoever searches this is usually choosing between four different ways of getting a website, and the four leave very different things behind.

The four ways to get a website, and what each one leaves you with

The third row is the one people search for, and it is the only row where a monthly payment goes to somebody other than the platform that hosts the site. That single difference decides what happens in the second year.

Year two is where the four models separate

These are the audited figures from this site's own builder pages: the entry rate the vendor prints, the rate it renews at, and what two years costs.

Three of the five renew at the rate they sell at. Wix's promo rate is half its renewal rate, and Shopify's first three months at a dollar are followed by $25.00 a month on the annual plan — a step of 25x. The mechanism is arithmetic rather than rumour: Why do website builders increase renewal prices by 2x to 4x after year one? has the audited step behind every multiple, and How much should a website cost? carries the ledger this table comes from.

What happens when you leave

This is where a WaaS relationship and a subscription differ most, and this site's own audit of 51 builders is blunt about it.

Tilda's export licence is the sharpest version of this: the files arrive, and the licence forbids moving them, editing them elsewhere, removing the attribution, or deploying them anywhere but the one declared domain. That is export-shaped ownership rather than ownership. What happens to my website if I cancel my builder subscription? sets out what "you own it" has to mean for the question to be worth asking.

Where Zeso sits — and where it does not

Zeso is the fourth row, not the third. It is not a website-as-a-service agency: it does not build sites for other agencies to resell. It is the platform a WaaS agency runs on, and the option for a business that does not want an agency retainer at all — a site that stays fast, secure and updated without one, which is what website maintenance without the retainer is for.

The rule this site holds itself to is simple: the files are already the customer's, at every tier, with no export fee and no export tier. How to export your website is what that looks like in practice.

What to ask before you sign

1. What renews, and at what rate? Not what it sells at — what it renews

at. If the second rate is not published, that is the answer.

1. Who hosts it, and who are you actually paying? A WaaS agency is a

monthly fee on top of somebody else's hosting.

1. What do you own when you leave? The document, or a subscription.
2. Does the exit cost money? Carrd's $49 and Tilda's Business plan are

the two exit prices in this site's audit that nobody quotes before signing.

Sources

• The 51 audited builder pages on this site, each with the published rates

and the date they were read — including the renewal arithmetic behind every multiple above.

• Website builder vs. web hosting —

the editing layer against the runtime substrate, which is the distinction the four models above are really about.