What Philadelphia Businesses Actually Overpay For Online
A friend of mine, Joe Giel, runs FiorPay here in the city. He reviews credit card processing statements line by line, independently, and he told me about a travel agency he'd looked at recently.
Joe: They were paying a $120 monthly service fee on top of their regular 3.5%. The monthly fee wasn't for anything. It was just on the account.
$1,440 a year, for nothing, sitting on a statement nobody reads past page one.
I bring it up because I do the same job on a different bill. When a business sends me what they're paying for their website, hosting and marketing, I find the same thing Joe finds — reliably, and usually more than once.
Here's what I actually see.
1. Hosting sold at a 10–20× markup
Hosting a standard small business website genuinely costs somewhere between $5 and $25 a month. That's the real number.
I regularly see local businesses paying $150–$300 a month for "hosting." When you ask what's included beyond hosting, the answer is some combination of vagueness and "support."
Hosting is not a service that scales in cost with your business. A five-page site for a plumber and a five-page site for a law firm cost the same to host, which is very little. If you're paying triple digits monthly, you're paying for something else — and you're entitled to know what.
How to check: ask your provider, in writing, what your monthly fee covers besides hosting. A clear answer means it's probably fair. A defensive one tells you what you need to know.
2. "Maintenance" that maintains nothing
The most common line item in this industry, and the hardest to pin down.
Legitimate maintenance is real work: software and plugin updates, security patching, backups you've actually tested, uptime monitoring, and fixing things that break. That's worth paying for.
What's frequently sold as maintenance is: hosting, plus somebody being theoretically available.
How to check: ask for a log of what was done in the last three months. Any provider genuinely maintaining your site can produce that in minutes, because the work leaves a trail. If the answer is "we monitor things," you're buying availability, not maintenance — and availability should be priced accordingly.
3. Paying monthly for a template you already own
There's a model where you pay a low build fee and a healthy monthly, and what you got was a template with your logo dropped in.
Nothing wrong with templates in themselves — plenty of businesses are well served by one. The problem is the pricing shape: you pay indefinitely for something that took an afternoon and involved no ongoing cost to deliver.
How to check: search a distinctive phrase from your site's layout, or look at three other businesses in your trade using the same provider. If the sites are structurally identical, you bought a template. That's fine — just don't pay custom prices forever for it.
4. Not owning your own domain
This one isn't a fee. It's worse.
Some providers register your domain in their name rather than yours. It works fine right up until you want to leave, at which point your web address — the thing your customers know, your Google listing points at, and every backlink you've earned refers to — turns out not to be yours.
I've seen businesses pay four figures to get their own domain back. I've seen others simply give up and start again on a new one, which quietly destroys years of local SEO.
How to check: look up your domain on any WHOIS service. If your name or your business isn't listed as registrant, sort that out this week. It's the single most important item on this list, and it costs nothing to verify.
5. SEO with no reporting attached
SEO is a legitimate service. It's also the easiest thing in this industry to invoice for without doing.
The tell isn't the price — good SEO isn't cheap. The tell is the absence of evidence. If you get an invoice each month and no report showing what was done, what changed, and which keywords moved, you have no way to distinguish real work from none at all. And a provider who knows you can't tell has very little incentive to do the work.
How to check: ask for last month's report. Then ask to be added as a user on your own Google Search Console — you should have access to your own data regardless of who does the work.
6. The cheap build that gets replaced in 18 months
The one nobody counts as a fee, because it looks like a saving.
A $1,000 template build with stock copy and no strategy typically gets rebuilt within a year and a half — because it doesn't convert, doesn't rank, and the business outgrows it. Add the second build and the year of underperformance in between, and the cheap option was substantially more expensive than doing it once.
This isn't an argument for expensive websites. It's an argument for buying one that will still be right in three years, whatever that costs.
The pattern behind all six
Every item above shares the three properties that make a cost invisible:
It's automatic. Nothing on auto-debit gets reviewed.
It's complicated on purpose. Confusing invoices don't get questioned. That's not incompetence — in Joe's industry and in mine, it's a strategy.
It's small relative to revenue. $150 a month isn't worth a difficult phone call. It's also $1,800 a year.
Why our pricing is on the website
Everything above is a reason our pricing is published rather than quoted per prospect.
Not as a moral stance — it's practical. A business that can't state its pricing in public is usually pricing by what it thinks each customer will tolerate. Publishing it means I can't do that, which is rather the point.
Joe came to the same conclusion in an industry with a worse reputation than mine. It's why we get on.
A twenty-minute audit
Not a project. One sitting:
- What are you paying monthly for hosting, maintenance, and marketing — as three separate numbers?
- Ask what each covers. In writing. The quality of the answer is the answer.
- WHOIS your domain. Confirm you're the registrant.
- Request last month's SEO report. If there isn't one, there wasn't any.
- Check your Search Console access. It's your data.
Most owners find something in the first ten minutes. Usually annoying rather than catastrophic — which is exactly why it survived this long.
While you're at it, the cost of the calls your business misses is generally a bigger number than any of these. Different problem, same principle: it's invisible, so nobody checks.
If it's your payment processing
Talk to Joe at FiorPay. He'll review your statement line by line at no cost and he's independent, so he isn't steering you toward one processor. He found $1,440 a year sitting on one client's account that shouldn't have been there.
If it's your website, hosting or marketing spend — that's mine.
Send me what you're paying. Tell me what your website, hosting and marketing cost each month and what you're told you get. I'll tell you straight whether it's fair — including when it is, which happens more often than you'd think. Get a straight answer →