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Build a site — what does it actually cost a year?

Do the maths before you start. Pick a scenario you plan to build, or choose each item yourself, and the total yearly cost and monthly average update live. The reality of a static site: most scenarios run on 50–150 CNY a year.

Start estimating → See the full build flow

Estimated yearly hosting cost

Pick a scenario preset first (it fills in a recommended config), or change any item yourself. Prices are a rough take on 2026 mainstream cloud-vendor promo pricing; the vendor’s live quote is the final word. This site does not resell these services or take a cut.

Loading cost data…
— CNY / year
≈ — CNY / mo · breakdown:
What do these terms mean?

How to push the cost down

  1. 1
    Skip the server when free static hosting will do. For blogs, docs and landing pages — pure content sites — the free tier of Vercel / GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Pages is enough, zeroing the server line.
  2. 2
    No need to pay for a certificate. Let’s Encrypt renews free automatically; a paid DV cert is pure waste for a personal site — unless you need a wildcard or organisation validation.
  3. 3
    Turn on a CDN based on your audience. If visitors are all local and the site is small, origin-direct is usually fine; for global speed, start with Cloudflare’s free tier.
  4. 4
    Object storage only costs money when you actually store things. No big image bed, no user uploads, this line is 0; early on, source in a Git repo already gives you a backup.
  5. 5
    Domains are once a year, but renewal is the real long-term cost. First-year promos are cheap, but watch the renewal price — pick a common .com / .cn rather than a low-trust new TLD for a few yuan.

Want to see how each item is actually configured and shipped? Go to the site wizard for the matching scenario (private image bed, CDN + HTTPS, backup & DR).