In many B2B companies the website has no budget of its own. It gets built by people already on the team: a product developer who "knows how to do websites", the marketing lead who writes the copy and puts together the landing pages, the product designer who helps with the images, and the CTO, who reviews everything before it goes live. No supplier, no invoice, and on the P&L the website looks free.
It isn't. Once you add up the hours and salaries of the people keeping it going, building the website in-house can turn out to be expensive. And the most expensive part isn't even what you pay; it's what doesn't get done in the meantime.
Why it looks like the cheapest option
Doing it in-house has reasonable arguments behind it: the team knows the product and the money is already spent, because salaries get paid either way. That last idea is the trap. The fact that salaries get paid either way doesn't make those hours free; it means they're being taken from something else.
On top of that, the cost is scattered. Six hours here, four there, a review on Friday. Nobody sees it all together, so nobody adds it up.
The in-house website iceberg
Above the water there's a single number: the supplier invoice, €0. Below it is everything else:
- Hours from expensive people. People hired for product, marketing or management spending part of their week on something that isn't their main job.
- Context switching. Jumping from product code to a website form and back isn't free. Every interruption forces you to refocus on the previous task, and that time doesn't show up on any timesheet.
- The website is always last in the queue. When there's a bug in production or a customer deliverable, the website waits. The landing page that was due on Monday ships three weeks later, when the campaign has already started.
- Quality and consistency. Whoever builds the website in their spare moments rarely has time to set up a design system, so every page gets solved however it can and the site slowly loses consistency.
- Nobody owns it. If the website is everyone's job, it's nobody's, and it ends up going stale; we cover that in why B2B websites go stale.
A worked example
Say a B2B company has four people sharing the website on top of their other work. The assumptions:
- The figures are cost to company, not gross salary. In Spain, cost to company includes the employer's social security contributions, around 30% on top of gross salary. Other countries have different rates, so use yours.
- About 1,760 working hours a year to get the hourly cost, and 46 working weeks to turn weekly hours into annual ones.
With that, the math looks like this:
- Product developer: €55,000 a year cost to company (≈ €31/h) and 6 hours a week on the website: 276 hours, about €8,600.
- Marketing lead: €60,000 a year (≈ €34/h) and 4 hours a week: 184 hours, about €6,300.
- Product designer: €50,000 a year (≈ €28/h) and 3 hours a week: 138 hours, about €3,900.
- CTO or management reviewing: 1 hour a week at €50/h, about €2,300.
Total: around €21,100 a year in hours, without a single supplier invoice.
And that's only what you pay. The most important part is still missing.
The cost that shows up nowhere: opportunity cost
Opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative you give up when you choose something; Wikipedia explains it in more detail. Applied to the website: every hour your product developer spends on the website is an hour not spent improving the product, which is what actually helps you sell more and keep customers.
In the example, those 276 hours are almost seven weeks of full-time product work. Seven weeks for a feature customers keep asking for, for paying down technical debt or for improving onboarding. The same goes for marketing: hours spent building pages aren't spent on strategy, campaigns or the go-to-market plan for the next launch.
That cost never appears in the accounts, and in a company that lives off its product it can weigh more than the number itself.
When doing it in-house does make sense
- Very early on, when the website is a simple page, the product changes every week and there's no volume or budget yet.
- When there's a person dedicated to the website, with time, judgment and ownership. Then it's no longer a side task but a role: the cost is visible, and so is the work.
The problem isn't building the website in-house; it's building it in-house in spare moments, with people hired to do something else.
The alternatives
If the number comes out high, there are three usual routes, and we compare them in detail in in-house, agency or subscription team:
- Hire someone dedicated to the website and marketing design. It makes sense if there's steady work for a full-time role.
- A project-based agency, for a new website or a redesign with a clear start and end.
- An external subscription team, known as a productized agency, for the continuous flow of landing pages, changes and small pieces.
None of them is free. The difference is that their cost is visible and you can compare it.
How to calculate it for your company
- List everyone who touches the website, even briefly: development, marketing, design, management and sometimes sales.
- Estimate each person's weekly hours over a normal month. Ask each of them instead of guessing.
- Multiply by their hourly cost: annual cost to company divided by about 1,760 hours, and weekly hours times 46 weeks.
- Add the opportunity cost: turn the product hours into weeks of work and ask yourself what would have shipped in that time.
Conclusion
The in-house website looks free because its cost doesn't arrive as an invoice; it's spread across the calendars of people who should be doing something else. Doing the full math doesn't always lead to outsourcing, but it does mean deciding with the real numbers on the table. If you want to compare it with a fixed monthly fee, you can see what subscription team plans look like.
