The Cost of a Cheap CMS
We migrated a client off a $25/month builder onto a real CMS. The first-month bill came as a relief, not a surprise.
Cheap CMSes have a price model that resembles a gym membership: the upfront cost is low, the lock-in is high, and the actual cost shows up as the value of your time over years.
The Harbor Collective project we shipped in April was a migration off a $25/month builder. Their staff was spending roughly four hours a week working around the platform's limitations — reformatting content, manually patching SEO fields the platform didn't expose, sending support requests for things that would have been a five-minute fix in a real CMS.
At $40/hour of staff time — the conservative number — that's $8,320 a year of hidden cost. The 'cheap' platform was, in practice, the most expensive option they had.