A little subscription, a 3-year expense.
The worked loss example
Run 5 content sites / landing pages for 36 months on a high-premium build stack — Webflow CMS at $29/mo plus extra bandwidth and seat fees, or a Managed WordPress plan whose renewal jumps to $35/mo after the intro year — and the 3-year total spend reaches $5,220–$6,300.
Swap to Mixo.io ($9/mo) or Super.so ($16/mo) for the build layer, or park all sites on one shared Vultr $6/mo high-frequency VPS — one box hosts every site, billed once per stack — and the same 3 years costs only $216–$2,880. Net saving vs the legacy rows: $4,680 on the audited Mixo tier, $6,084 on the self-hosted floor — conservatively $4,140+ of renewal-price-hike tax, eliminated.
Where the money actually goes
The largest leak is the year-2/3 renewal: intro promo rates ($3.99/mo) reset to $21.99–$35/mo, often with single-site and visit-count caps. The formula in the worksheet uses a conservative $35/site/mo legacy assumption.
Launch on Mixo.io ↗Build on Super.so ↗Host on Vultr ↗LisaHost US Dual-ISP VPS (10% Code: TS-CBP205DQJE) ↗