What is your current platform really costing you?

How this calculation works

A calculator that won't show its assumptions isn't worth much, so here are ours.

The subscription column takes your current annual platform fee and compounds it by the annual increase you entered, for the number of years you chose, then adds any up-front build or redesign cost. The ownership column takes a one-time Munikit implementation plus the software licence, and adds the optional annual renewal — which buys software updates, not the right to keep running. The two columns are then compared over the same period.

Why the escalator matters more than the headline fee

The number a vendor quotes you is a year-one number. The number you will actually pay is a compounding one.

Real, signed public contracts in this market contain a clause raising fees by an annual increase of 5% each renewal term. That sounds modest. Compounded across a typical seven- to ten-year vendor relationship, it is not: a fee that starts at $8,000 is over $11,000 by year eight, and you will have paid roughly $76,000 in total without owning anything at the end. The escalator is doing more work in that number than the sticker price is.

This is the single most useful question to take back to your current vendor, or to any vendor bidding on your next site: is there an annual increase written into the renewal clause, and what is it? The answer is often in the contract you already signed.

What we have deliberately left out

We could make this comparison look better for us than it does. We have not, because a number you can't defend in front of council is worthless to you.

• Hosting is excluded from both columns. A Munikit site is a standard application and you pay your hosting provider directly — for most small municipalities that is somewhere between nothing and about $25 a month. Subscription platforms typically bundle hosting into the fee. If you want a strictly like-for-like number, add your hosting estimate to the ownership column.
• Staff time is excluded from both columns. Every website costs somebody's hours, whichever way you buy it.
• The redesign cycle is excluded. Some subscription contracts include a refreshed design every few years at no extra charge. That is a genuine benefit and we have not modelled it against ourselves. If yours includes one, it is worth something real.
• Exit costs are excluded — which, if anything, understates the case. One major platform's standard contract offers a data export "for a fee to be quoted at time of request." An unspecified fee to get your own content back is a cost you cannot put in a spreadsheet, and that is rather the point.

What you actually own at the end

The money is only half of it. At the end of five years on a subscription platform, you have paid for five years of access and you own nothing — not the code, not the templates, and in some cases not a clean export of your own content. Stop paying and the site stops.

At the end of five years on the ownership model, the site is yours. The source code is in your git repository, your content is in a standard PostgreSQL database, and any competent developer can take it on. If you let the annual renewal lapse, nothing switches off — you simply stop receiving updates, on the version you already have. That difference does not show up in the headline savings figure, and for a lot of councils it is the part that actually decides the vote.

Before you trust any of this

Take our number and go and check it. Pull your current contract and find three things: the annual increase, the auto-renewal window, and what it costs to get your data out. Those three clauses will tell you more about your next five years than any calculator will.

If you would like the full arithmetic — including what a new website should cost in the first place, and what accessibility work adds to the bill — we have written it up: what a municipal website actually costs, and an RFP template with the ownership and exit clauses most municipalities forget to ask for.