The Shed Standard: What ChrisJM Costs Me to Keep Standing

A bloke at a party asked me what it costs to run ChrisJM. I said it was somewhere south of a Friday night curry and north of nothing. He laughed, then looked at me properly, because he assumed a website must be a permanent drip of money — a little tap left running under the sink that you never quite get round to fixing.

I get it. That's what the internet has trained us to expect. Everything is a subscription, every subscription renews at 3am like a cat bringing in something dead, and by the time you've added up "just £9 a month" six times over you're paying more for your website than you are for your broadband.

So let me open the tin and tip it out on the table.

First, the reason I even know the number

I keep a running total. Not because I'm tight (though I am), but because a number you've never added up is a number that's quietly making decisions for you. If I don't know what the site costs, I can't say no to things sensibly. I just drift — a plugin here, a tool there — until the bill has more line items than my car insurance and I've stopped reading it.

Knowing the figure is the whole audit. Everything else is detail.

The bill, line by line

Here's the shape of it in 2026, rounded and honest:

The domain. A .co.uk renews once a year for something in the low teens. Call it £12. It's the only part of this operation I'd defend in a fight, because it's the address, the letterhead and the door number all at once.

Hosting. Shared hosting, modest tier, paid annually to dodge the monthly surcharge. Around £55 a year. It's not glamorous. It's a shed with a solid floor and a light that comes on when you flick the switch, and that's all I've ever needed from it.

Backups. Weekly snapshots to storage I don't think about. About £18 a year. This is the one line I refuse to be clever about. Losing the site once teaches you that the boring line item is the cheap one.

Email forwarding. Free with the domain, and it does the job. I answer from an inbox that looks like a person, not a ticket queue.

One form service. Roughly £20 a year so my contact page doesn't dump messages into the void. Worth every penny, given I've spent years telling people to come in and wipe their feet.

Everything else. Nothing. Genuinely nothing.

Add it up and it lands somewhere around £105 for the year. Eight or nine quid a month. Less than a large curry with rice, a naan and a can of something cold, and the site doesn't leave me thirsty at midnight.

What I deliberately don't pay for

This list matters more than the bill itself:

• No page builder on subscription. The markup is mine and it doesn't phone home.
• No premium theme renewing annually for "updates and support" I've never once used.
• No analytics suite with sixteen dashboards and a cookie banner the size of a wheelie bin. I look at server logs like a man checking the rain gauge.
• No newsletter platform charging by the subscriber. The RSS feed works. It's been working since before either of us was born.
• No SEO toolkit, no AI writing assistant, no "growth" anything. I'd rather write two good paragraphs than five automated ones.

Each of those is a small monthly fee that feels reasonable on its own and unreasonable all together. Six tools at £12 a month is £864 a year, which is a fortnight's holiday, and for what? So a personal site can pretend to be a company.

The treadmill is the real expense

Here's my actual argument, and it's not about being frugal for frugality's sake. Subscription creep changes how a site feels. When you're paying for a suite of tools, you start feeling obliged to justify them. You add the newsletter because you're paying for it. You stuff in the popup because the tool has a popup. You blog about the tooling instead of the thing you wanted to say, because the tooling is now a cost centre that has to earn its keep.

None of that happens when the bill fits on one line. Nothing needs justifying. I write when I've got something, and the site sits there quietly being a shed.

The shed test

I grew up around sheds. My grandad's had a padlock you could open with a spoon, three jars of screws sorted by size, and a lawnmower that he understood completely. It was cheap to run and it worked because he looked after it.

That's the standard I hold ChrisJM to. Does the roof leak? No. Does the door shut? Yes. Can I fix the lock myself without ringing a support line in a different time zone? So far, yes. Is anything in there I don't recognise or didn't choose? No.

A well-kept shed beats a rented workshop every time. The workshop is bigger, and you'll spend your weekends paying for it.

Where I would happily spend more

I'm not dogmatic about this. Three things get a free pass:

Backups. Increase it if I ever need to. Peace of mind at £18 a year is a steal. The domain. If it costs a bit more to keep it on a proper registrar with actual humans, fine. Anything that makes the site faster for people on a rubbish connection. Speed is a kindness. I'll pay for kindness.

What I won't pay for is ambition dressed up as infrastructure.

The boring conclusion

The number is roughly £105 a year, and it's the least interesting thing about the site. That's the review. If running ChrisJM ever becomes a financial decision — if I'm weighing the cost of a tool against the value of a post — then I've built the wrong thing and I should go back to the shed and start again.

You can see the whole thing itemised on my colophon if you're the sort of person who likes a receipt. I am. It's the same instinct that keeps me checking the biscuit tin: not to ration them, just to know what's in there before I go shopping.