Blog/Premium web design

The 36-month total cost of a website in Spain: the real number

27 August 20261 min

The 36-month total cost of a website in Spain: the real number

The initial quote for a website is just the first installment, not the total price. We break down the eleven cost items over 36 months in Spain, including VAT, verified prices, and your internal hours.

The 36-month total cost of a website in Spain is the sum of the initial project plus domain, hosting, licenses, legal compliance, ongoing developments, and internal team hours over three years. At Aura Design, we calculate it this way: the quote you sign is the first installment, not the total price. Without this calculation, you are comparing non-comparable offers.

The quote is the first installment, not the price

When you request three website quotes, you receive three project figures. None of the three reflects what the website will actually cost you.

What it will cost you is the TCO: the total cost of ownership over the asset's useful life. This is an old framework in infrastructure procurement and vehicle fleet management, yet it remains almost absent from the Spanish conversation regarding website pricing. We calculate it at 36 months because three years is the reasonable lifespan of a corporate website before a serious redesign is needed.

This is not about scaring you with hidden costs. It is about comparing apples to apples: a €1,500 offer with annual licenses and your own hours invested might end up being more expensive over three years than a €9,000 all-inclusive package with a handover. That €1,500 range is market reality, not an Aura offer; our baseline starts at €3,000, and our public rates include VAT.

Three quotes are not three prices: they are three first installments of three different commitments.

The eleven items that make up the TCO

An honest TCO is built by line items, not by intuition. These are the eleven we use in our projects and in the calculator.

ItemFigureNote
Initial project: design, content, and development—Paid once. This is the major item and the only one almost everyone quotes.
Domain (3 renewals)—From €7.69/year for a .es at Raiola Networks, excluding VAT (checked 08-27-2026)
Hosting and CDN (36 months)—From €8.95/month for the entry-level managed WordPress hosting plan in Spain, excluding VAT (raiolanetworks.com/hosting-wordpress, 08-27-2026)
Theme, plugin, and SaaS licenses——
Cookie consent platform—Cookiebot: free for up to 50 subpages and one domain; paid above that (checked 08-27-2026)
Professional email per mailbox——
Corrective maintenance and updates——
Ongoing developments: new pages, campaigns, integrations——
Compliance: accessibility and GDPR—Audit and remediation following Law 11/2023
Internal team hours—The invisible item. Estimated below.
Redesign or migration at the end of the cycle—If you do not own the code, this item spikes.

— = data being measured; we will publish it once we have our own sample.

Note that six of these eleven items do not appear in a standard website quote. Not because anyone is deceiving you, but because a quote describes a deliverable, while the TCO describes a service over time.

The figures you can verify today

These three are public, verifiable, and we have consulted them this week. We provide them with sources so you don't have to take our word for it.

Regarding VAT, a clarification that changes the final number: if you are a freelancer or a company with taxable activity, the 21% is deductible, and your TCO is based on the tax base. If you are an association, a clinic, or any exempt activity, that 21% is a real cost that must be added to the eleven items. The same website costs 21% more depending on who buys it, not who makes it.

And a warning about tools invoiced outside Spain. When checking the Shopify pricing page in Spanish on 08-27-2026, the plans appear in dollars ($29, $79, and $299/month with annual billing), not euros. Cookiebot shows the free plan in euros and the paid plans in dollars on the same table. This currency contradiction is not just a detail: it implies a variable exchange rate, bank commissions, and reverse charge VAT (inversión del sujeto pasivo) with reporting on form 349. We have yet to see a Spanish website pricing calculator that takes this into account.

The invisible item: your own hours

This is where almost all calculations fall apart.

Standard industry practice: The industry calculates the cost of the website as if your team's hours were free: uploading posts, requesting changes, reviewing texts, chasing the provider.

Our criteria: We include them in the TCO with an explicit internal rate, because these are hours your team is not spending on sales.

A reasoned estimation: if a team member spends 2 hours per week on the website and their company cost is about €25/hour—an estimation, not a measured data point: a gross salary of about €34,000 plus employer contributions around 31% (23.60% common contingencies, unemployment, FOGASA, professional training, and MEI) equals about €44,500 in company cost, divided by the ~1,780 annual working hours—it amounts to 104 hours per year and €7,800 over 36 months. This is a rule of three with the assumptions clearly visible—gross, contributions, and annual hours—so you can adjust them to your own. Change them in the calculator and you will see how much this item weighs compared to the initial project.

Accessibility and compliance: the new item for the 2026-2029 cycle

Since June 28, 2025, the requirements of Title I of Law 11/2023, the Spanish transposition of the European Accessibility Act, have been in effect. It affects e-commerce, banking, passenger transport, and other services listed in the law, with exceptions regulated by the law itself.

If your website falls within its scope, remediation is a TCO item, not an anecdote. And it is an item that grows if the website was built without considering it: contrast, visible keyboard focus, and header structure are design decisions, not a last-minute patch.

Kit Digital is no longer available for new applications. Red.es published the closure of the application deadline for the last two calls on October 31, 2025. If someone offers you a 'free website with the Kit' today, ask them for the reference of the open call before continuing the conversation. Verified 08-27-2026.

Performance: the cost that appears on no invoice

The Core Web Vitals thresholds are public and stable: LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of visits, separating mobile and desktop (Google documentation on web.dev, checked 08-27-2026).

A website that fails these does not send you an invoice. It charges you in another currency. And the fix, when it comes, usually means redoing templates and touching the grid all over again: it is item eleven on the chart, moved up to month 18 instead of month 36.

How to use the calculator

The 36-month total cost calculator does three things a quote does not: it separates one-time payments from recurring fees, lets you mark whether or not you recover the VAT, and forces you to put a number in the box for your own hours.

  • It explicitly states 'plus VAT' or 'VAT included' rather than leaving it ambiguous
  • It mentions code, source files, and documentation in the transfer of rights
  • It distinguishes corrective maintenance from ongoing developments, with separate pricing
  • It lists third-party licenses and who pays for them from month 13 onwards
  • It states what happens to the hosting if you leave: whether it migrates with you or stays
  • It sets a price per phase agreed upon before starting, with no surprise hours

In our projects, the price per phase is agreed upon before starting; code, source files, and documentation are delivered, and there is 30 days of support after launch. We mention this here because an article about total cost loses its meaning if the studio signing it does not show its own cost structure.

A quote describes a deliverable; the 36-month cost describes a commitment. Take the quote you have on your desk today and fill in the eleven boxes of the chart: if six remain empty, you do not have a price, you have an installment.

Send us those eleven filled boxes, and in a first 30-minute call, free of charge, we will tell you which ones we have seen skyrocket in month 18. We respond in less than 24 working hours.

Frequently asked questions

Does the 36-month total cost include VAT?

It depends on your activity: if you deduct VAT, calculate based on the tax base; if you do not deduct it, add 21% to each taxable item. The calculator has a switch for both situations and does not decide for you.

Is a €1,500 website cheaper over three years than a €9,000 one?

That €1,500 range is market reality, not an Aura offer; our baseline is €3,000. Sometimes yes and sometimes no, and the difference lies in the licenses, your hours, and whether you own the code. We are not going to tell you the expensive option always wins: if your case can be solved with a template, we will tell you.

How much should one reserve annually for maintenance?

The honest figure depends on the platform and the number of integrations, and we have yet to publish our measured data.

Why 36 months and not 5 years?

Because three years is the horizon in which a corporate website maintains its structure without a major redesign. At five years, the calculation adds a complete redesign and stops comparing quotes to start comparing different decisions.

Keep reading

Transparency note. Some of our own data in this guide is still being measured on real projects, with a single method. We will publish it with its sample size and date range once the sample is large enough; until then, every figure you see carries its source and date of consultation.

Sources

Want to see this thinking applied to a real project?

See case studies Talk to the studio