Ouch. I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of this business model from a web design/development company in my entire life. You’re hustlin’ backwards dude. I honestly, don’t really even believe you… how many sites are you even managing then? How many domain renewals are you on the hook for now on a yearly basis?
You can pay $120 a year to use Formspree - which shouldn’t really be a problem so no need to address the cost - just “hide” those fees and recover them from your next web pitch or even start charging people going forward a nominal fee for hosting on YOUR SERVER - problem solved.
The solution provided below is very simple - I believe it to be a very minimal amount of work that still facilitates a method of keeping everything nice and tidy inside each Webflow build.
As a suggestion, I would stop the “everything free for life” model. You can come off as friendly, knowledgeable, and transparent while still conveying that there are certain monthly & yearly “cost-of-doing-business” expenses involved with owning and running a website for their business, product, or service. If they don’t want to pay it, then they don’t want a website - it’s really that simple.
I mean, I get it - I don’t do the whole blanket monthly fee of X amount of dollars for “updates, maintenance, and hosting” to my clients either. I charge them what Webflow charges me - then if they need changes, whether small or large I quote those on a per need basis. I handle simple stuff for free because I like to be a nice guy that doesn’t nickel and dime my clients.
Change your pitch up, mine goes something like this:
“Are there any additional or on-going fees”
“Yep, you got a buy a domain - it’s about $10 a year, then you have to pay for monthly hosting which is like paying internet rent to park your new site on a bunch of web servers. It’s about as much as a few coffee’s or latte’s per month… so yea - nothing like your internet or phone bill”
Once you get to the finer details of $12 month annually, or $15 month to month or whatever it is… you’ve already let them know they blow that amount of money on trivial or unnecessary stuff (like coffee) and compared their new shiny marketing tool as just another “cost-of-doing-business”. By the time you get done throwing out buzzwords and phrases like 99.99% uptime, some of the fastest hosting available, assets served up via Content Delivery Network, Amazon Cloudfront, push changes with a click, SSL, security, backups, versioning, blah, blah, blah they are scrambling to sign the contract/proposal.