Let’s talk about a word mix-up that costs small business owners a ton of money: inexpensive vs. cheap.
They sound similar, right? But they are wildly different.
- Cheap means low price and low quality.
- Inexpensive means low price but good quality.
That one little difference? It can mean the difference between smooth sailing and an expensive headache later on.
Illustrating The Point With Car Parts
Imagine you’ve got a 20-year-old rust-bucket car you’re trying to squeeze one more year out of. In this case, when your goal is just getting that one extra year of use, buying the cheapest replacement part almost certainly makes sense.
But if it’s a vehicle you rely on to get to work every day? Cheap parts just lead to more repairs, more downtime, and more money wasted. You’re far better off investing a few extra dollars in the correct, OEM quality part because it will last, and you’ll only pay for the part and the labor one time, not 3.
It’s the same with your digital presence. Don’t throw bargain-bin parts at a tool you depend on every single day. If you miss out on just ONE sale, you will almost certainly blow away all your “savings” and then some.
Why This Matters: Our Most-Common (and Most-Ridiculous) Example
One of the most common places we see this mistake? Domain registration. It’s not flashy. It’s not exciting. But it’s foundational. And it’s where the “cheap” vs. “inexpensive” trap gets a lot of people.
We see folks picking a domain registrar that’s $3 cheaper per year. That’s 25 cents per month. Less than 1 cent per day.
But here’s the thing: at some point, nearly everyone needs to do something more advanced than just pointing a domain at a basic website. When that time comes, those ultra-budget registrars fall apart.
Suddenly, you’re:
- Paying someone (often us) an hourly rate to figure out a workaround, or
- Forced to move the domain to a decent registrar before you can even solve the problem.
Both options? Way more expensive than just spending the extra 6 cents a day upfront.
We’ve been there. We used to use GoDaddy for our registrations. Once upon a time, they were great. Now? Not so much. Their support is a shadow of what it used to be. The upsells are endless. And they can’t even handle basic HTTPS redirects on domain forwards. That’s basic stuff. They just don’t offer it.
And that’s still better than many of the cut-rate providers out there. The really cheap ones? They’re often missing key features, have clunky user interfaces, and are prone to technical bugs that bring your site down. We had a client on Turbify whose domain was broken due to an issue on their end. Their response? “Yep, we know. No idea when we’ll fix it.”
Meanwhile, the client’s website stayed down.
The Math Doesn’t Lie
If you save $3 per year but have to pay someone just once to fix a problem for $50… congrats! You’ve just wiped out 16.5 years of savings. For a single issue.
That’s not a deal. That’s a terrible investment.
We use Porkbun now and have been really happy. There are other great providers out there too. We have no affiliation with them, we’re just sharing what’s worked. The point is: spending a few dollars more for a reliable, full-featured, well-supported registrar is 100% worth it.
Another “Cheap” Trap: Websites
Another place we see people going down the “cheap” path: website builds.
We get it. A local web company quotes you $1,800. Someone overseas offers to do it for $1,500. You save $300. Great deal, right?
Unfortunately, 90% of the time, that $300 savings turns into thousands of dollars in problems later on.
We regularly see sites that:
- Are hard to update or customize
- Use bloated templates or drag-and-drop builders (because the dev didn’t know how to code)
- Crash often or conflict with plugins
- Load slowly and hurt your user experience
- Have zero keyword strategy in the content
- Have spelling and grammar errors
That means you need to hire someone else (often us again!) to clean it up, optimize it, and basically rebuild what you thought you were getting. That $300 almost never covers the time we have to invest in fixing all the problems.
Worse, basic changes (the things that should take 5 minutes and we would therefore do for free) now take an hour or more. And you’re getting charged for every one of those hours. That “cheap” website? Not so cheap anymore. In fact, it’s not unusual for those sites to cost you more than DOUBLE their purchase price within just a couple years.
Expertise Is Not a Commodity
There’s this myth that everything online should be free or dirt-cheap. But when it comes to things like websites, ads, SEO, and branding, you’re not buying a product, you’re buying labor and expertise.
Would you trust a guy with zero plumbing experience to fix a pipe in your customer’s house? Of course not.
Well, the same goes for building and managing your online presence. We clean up cheap work every single week. And sure, we get paid to do it, but we’d much rather see you do it right the first time.
Final Thought
If you take just one thing away from this, let it be this: inexpensive is great, cheap is a money-pit.
When you’re running a business, every dollar counts, but that doesn’t mean every dollar should be pinched. Think longer-term. This is one of the ways the rich get richer. By thinking of the total cost outlay on a 5 year timeline, instead of a 5 day timeline, they spend less overall, keeping more in their pocket. Invest wisely. And don’t let 6 cents a day become a bottomless pit of expenses.
