Most quotes state the build price and go quiet about what follows. Then year two arrives with a bill nobody mentioned. Running costs are a separate line, and you are entitled to see them before you sign.
The domain: cheapest item, most important
A .com runs about SAR 40-60 a year, a .sa slightly more. The amount is trivial; the point is ownership. The domain is your address, and whoever holds it holds you. Register it in your own name from day one, and do not accept it sitting under your developer's account.
Hosting: do not pay for what you will not use
A brochure site or blog does not need a powerful server. Platforms like Vercel and Netlify host these free or near-free, and usually faster than traditional paid hosting. Costs rise when you have a database running continuously, many files, or heavy traffic.
- Static brochure site: SAR 0-150 a year.
- Database-backed site or small store: SAR 300-900 a year.
- A system or platform with steady users: SAR 900 and up, rising with growth.
Certificates and email
SSL is effectively free now through Let's Encrypt; anyone charging a large yearly fee for it is selling you something available at no cost. Email on your own domain is a genuine cost if you want Google Workspace or Microsoft 365: roughly SAR 25-50 per user per month.
Maintenance, which is widely misread
Maintenance is not development. It is updating libraries, watching for failures, backups, and fixing what breaks. Adding a page or a feature is new work, priced separately. A contract that blurs the two guarantees an argument within two months.
A rough figure to plan against
Small brochure site: SAR 100-400 a year all in. Online store: SAR 600-2,000, plus payment gateway fees charged per sale rather than as a subscription. Internal company system: from SAR 1,200, rising with user count.
In short
Ask for a short table in the quote titled "annual costs after launch", naming each item, who pays it and when. Whatever is not written today becomes a dispute in a year.