"Maintenance" sounds like an extra cost you can put off. In practice it is the real cost of owning a site — the sum of hosting, domain, updates, licences and labour that runs every year, whether you plan it or not. This article breaks down the bill with real numbers for the Bulgarian market in 2026.
What you pay every year
Even for a very ordinary business site, the yearly costs are not zero. Indicative ranges for Bulgaria:
| Cost | Per year | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Domain (.bg / .com) | €15–40 | .bg is more expensive than .com |
| Hosting (shared) | €50–200 | see the promo-price trap below |
| SSL certificate | €0–60 | Let's Encrypt is free; paid ones are for EV/business |
| Updates and security | €360–1,800 | yourself or on a retainer — but not optional |
| Plugin / theme licences | €0–800 | WooCommerce extensions, forms, bookings, backup |
| External backups | €0–120 | separate from the hosting backups |
| Business email | €0–70 per user | Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 |
| Uptime monitoring | €0–100 | often included in maintenance |
The "hard" costs alone (domain + hosting + licences + backups) for a small site are €100–400 a year. The labour for updates and security comes on top.
Hosting — the promo-price trap
The most common surprise in the bill is hosting on renewal. The promotional price ("first year -75%") applies only to the first period. On renewal the price is often 2–3 times higher — a plan bought at €3/month renews at €8–10/month.
The second thing that hits later is the technical limits of shared hosting: file count (inodes), CPU time, number of concurrent processes. A store with 500+ products or a site with 20,000+ visits a month starts to "hit" them — then comes the question of a VPS (€20–80/month) and managing it. More on this: WordPress hosting in Bulgaria.
Plugin subscriptions creep up
WordPress itself is free, but real sites use paid extensions — and they are a yearly subscription, not a one-off purchase. Typical examples:
- An advanced form / booking plugin: €50–120/year
- WooCommerce extensions (shipping, subscriptions, B2B pricing): €80–250/year each
- Premium backup / security: €60–150/year
- A page builder / premium theme: €50–100/year
For a mid-sized store the total easily reaches €300–800 a year for licences alone. If the subscription lapses, the extension keeps working but stops getting updates — which over time becomes a security hole.
Three budget scenarios
A small business site (WordPress, ~15 pages)
- Domain + hosting: €90/year
- Licences: €60/year
- Maintenance (basic, on a retainer): ~€900/year
- Total: ~€1,050/year
An online store (WooCommerce, 300–800 products)
- Domain + hosting (VPS or business plan): €300/year
- Extension licences: €400/year
- Maintenance + active SEO: ~€3,600/year
- Total: ~€4,300/year
A custom application
- Hosting (VPS / cloud): €500–1,500/year
- Maintenance and development: individual, usually from €4,000/year
Yourself or on a retainer
You can maintain the site yourself. The real monthly list looks like this: checking and updating core/theme/plugins (with a backup first), testing the key functions after the update, checking for broken links and errors, a security review, a speed and Core Web Vitals check, renewing expiring licences.
That is 2–4 hours a month if all is well, and a whole day if an update breaks something. On a retainer you pay someone else to carry that risk and respond quickly to an outage — instead of fixing it yourself on a Saturday night.
Market prices for maintenance in Bulgaria
| Tier | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Basic technical maintenance | €60–90/month | updates, backups, monitoring, small changes |
| Maintenance + active SEO | €150–300/month | the above + on-page SEO, content, a report |
| Premium / partner | from €600/month | the above + content, link building, CRO, priority |
| Hourly packs | 3 h ≈ €90 · 5 h ≈ €137 | for irregular tasks, no retainer |
Our packages follow this logic — see SEO and maintenance and the pricing page.
The hidden cost of "saved" maintenance
Putting off maintenance does not reduce the cost — it moves it forward in time and increases it:
- A hacked site: restoring from a clean backup + cleanup + password changes usually costs €300–1,500, plus the days the site is down.
- Dropping out of Google: a slow, insecure or inactive site loses positions. Recovering takes months. See what happens without maintenance.
- Lost data: without working external backups, one botched update or a hosting problem can mean rolling back to an old version — or starting from scratch.
Summary
The real yearly bill for maintaining a site in Bulgaria is roughly: a small business site ~€1,000, a mid-sized online store ~€4,000, a custom project — from €4,000. Most of that sum is labour for updates and security, which runs whether you plan it or not. The planned option (a retainer) is cheaper than the unplanned one (recovery after an incident).
Want a specific estimate for your site? Get in touch — we run a free short audit and say what is urgent and what maintenance will cost per month.
