In-house employee, freelancer or maintenance plan: who should look after your company website?

Sooner or later, every company with a website asks the same question: who should look after it? An employee? A freelancer? A specialist company on a monthly plan? Or "the person in the office who is good with computers"? The good news is that the right answer depends on a single, easily estimated thing: how many hours of real work your website actually needs each month.

Spoiler: for around 90% of company websites, the answer is "under 5 hours a month". And that changes the maths completely. Let us take each option in turn, with numbers and without romanticism.

Option 1: an in-house employee

It looks like the "safest" option — you have your own person, on hand. In reality it is the most expensive and rarely justified. An employee who genuinely knows how to maintain a website (server, PHP, security, some design) costs, with taxes included, anywhere from €500 to over €1,000 a month, even part-time. And they have to be good at everything: if they are strong on design but know nothing about server security, you still have a hole.

There is another problem: continuity. The employee goes on holiday, falls ill or resigns — and the website is suddenly orphaned, exactly when you need it. A dedicated employee is only worth it if you have a large website with daily changes and a real volume of work. For a brochure site or a small store, you are paying a salary for a few hours of work a month.

Option 2: a freelancer

Flexible and far cheaper — hence the popularity. A good freelancer can do excellent work. The problems are not about competence but about structure:

• Uncertain availability. They have 20 clients. When your site goes down on a day when they are tied up with someone else, you wait.
• No procedures. Do they back up before updating? Do they send you a report? Often not — because they do not have a system, they have a personal way of working.
• The biggest risk: they disappear. It is the most common pain people call us about — the developer or freelancer who built their site simply stops answering. With no contract, no guaranteed response time and no handover of credentials, you are stuck.

A freelancer is a good solution as long as the relationship works. But it is a relationship without a safety net — and that is precisely what makes it risky in the long run.

Option 3: "someone in the company who is good with computers"

The classic "my nephew who is good with computers" or the marketing colleague who "has built websites before". The apparent cost is zero — and that is exactly the trap. In reality:

• They do it in gaps between other work, whenever they have time, with no real routine.
• They hit "Update all" with no backup first, because "it has always worked so far".
• And when the site breaks seriously, they do not know how to fix it — so you end up with a professional anyway, only now on an emergency basis, at a higher cost.

"Free" quickly becomes the most expensive option on the day something really breaks.

Option 4: a plan with a specialist company

Here you pay a small fixed cost (from €34.99/month) for three things the other options struggle to provide:

• Procedures. Every intervention follows a clear flow: backup → update → test. It does not depend on anyone's mood.
• Continuity. There is a team behind it, not one person. If one is on holiday, another takes over. The website is never orphaned.
• Contractual accountability. The response time is committed to in writing. If an update breaks something, it is their job to fix it, at their cost.

The decision table: the 6 criteria that matter

To see the difference at a glance, compare the four options on the criteria that genuinely matter:

• Monthly cost: employee €500–1,000+ · freelancer €15–40 · internal "free" (but high risk) · plan €35–190.
• Availability: employee high (but with holidays) · freelancer uncertain · internal "when I get round to it" · plan contractually guaranteed.
• Procedures: person-dependent in the first three · standardised with a plan.
• Continuity: fragile in the first three (a single person) · covered by a team with a plan.
• Accountability: diffuse in the first three · contractual with a plan.
• Scaling: cumbersome with an employee or internal person · limited with a freelancer · flexible with a plan (you change tier).

When a plan is NOT the answer (yes, those cases exist)

To be fair: a maintenance plan is not a universal answer. If you have a site under intense, daily development — a platform that changes constantly, with a content team working non-stop — then you need dedicated in-house people, not a maintenance plan. That honesty matters: if somebody sells you a plan as a cure for everything, be cautious.

For the vast majority of businesses, though — a brochure site, a small or mid-size store, a few hours of real work a month — a plan wins comfortably on the cost-to-peace-of-mind ratio. And unlike a freelancer, it does not disappear. If you want to understand what is (and is not) included in such a plan, we wrote separately about what a maintenance plan includes.

Step zero, with no risk

You do not have to decide on the spot. The simplest first step is a free audit: we look at your website, tell you what state it is in and how much work it realistically needs each month. Only then do you decide which option suits you — with numbers in front of you, not guesswork.

And if you want to compare the cost of a plan directly against what you would pay an employee or spend on emergency call-outs, all the figures are on the pricing page, transparently, with no "request a quote".