costs at cost

There are two kinds of money in any website arrangement. There is what you pay the person doing the work, and there is what the underlying services cost: hosting, domain renewals, the odd tool. Costs at cost is my rule for the second kind. Whatever the provider charges is what you pay, billed to you by the provider, in your name, and I add nothing to it.

For most of the sites I build, that means Cloudflare. The site runs on Cloudflare’s network, the DNS is there, and the free tier covers a small business most of the time. Where it does not, Cloudflare bills the card on the account, and the card on the account is yours.

The alternative, which I have seen up close, is a vendor who bundles hosting into a monthly fee, holds the account, and sends invoices that read only “payment to” and a company name with no breakdown. When the owner wanted to leave, nobody could say what they were paying for or what would stop working.

Why it matters to you

The first reason is honesty. Hosting a static site on Cloudflare costs very little. If I marked it up and bundled it, you would never know that, and you would be paying for a line that should be close to zero. Billing it direct means you see the real number.

The second reason is independence. If the Cloudflare account is paid on my card and I am hit by a bus, the account lapses and your site goes with it. If it is on your card, nothing changes. This is the same reason your domains should renew from your account and your ad spend should go to Google from your account. I do not want to be a single point of failure, and I especially do not want to be the one holding your bills.

The third reason is that it keeps my fee clean. My fee is for the work. It is a fixed number you can see. It does not quietly grow with your traffic or your tooling.

How I set it up

During setup, the Cloudflare account is sometimes on my card so the build can move quickly. Before handover, billing moves to a card belonging to the business. That handover is done before the arrangement is called complete. From then on, Cloudflare bills you at its own published rate, direct.

Domain renewals work the same way, at the registrar’s rate, from your account. Where a project needs a paid tool beyond that, I name it up front with a rough monthly range, and it is billed as incurred with receipts attached. There is nothing on that list you cannot look up and check against the provider’s own price page.

What it looks like in practice

On the arrangement, the hosting and Cloudflare line says “paid by” the business, “at Cloudflare’s own rate, no markup”. That is the whole policy in one row. Your card statement shows a small charge from Cloudflare, or nothing at all on the free tier, and a separate, predictable invoice from me.

If you ever move to someone else, you keep paying Cloudflare the same small amount and simply stop paying me. Nothing needs to be untangled, because nothing was tangled. That is what accounts in the business’s name and costs at cost are for.