The Cheapest Subscription I Almost Cancelled: Notes on Keeping a Domain and a Practice

The renewal email arrived on a grey Tuesday, as it always does. Subject line: your domain is due to expire. Amount: £9.99. I have cancelled bigger things without blinking. A streaming service, a software trial, a gym membership I used exactly twice. But this one sat in the maybe pile for a few days. Work has been quiet. The site needed updating. I could feel the sensible voice saying: does anyone actually go there?

Then I paid it, as I have every November since I first bought the address in the 2010s. Not because I expect a flood of enquiries from it. Not because I am precious about my own name in a URL. Mostly because the £9.99 is the cheapest annual reminder I have that I am still doing this thing, and that the thing needs a place to live.

A receipt for the version of you that still shows up

A personal domain is not a business card. It is closer to a receipt. It says that at some point you decided your work deserved an address you controlled, and that you were willing to keep paying for it even when the work was slow, scruffy or between phases.

That sounds grander than it is. In practice, my site is a few pages, a handful of project notes and a contact form that occasionally gets spam. It is not a media empire. But it is mine in a way that a profile page is not. When I renew drewchapman.co.uk, I am not just buying a string of letters. I am keeping a small, fixed point in a year that otherwise moves in bursts of client work, inbox admin and whatever the platforms have decided to prioritise this month.

The price helps. £9.99 is not nothing, but it is less than a decent pub lunch in most UK cities. It is the kind of amount you can pay without a meeting or a business case. That makes it a useful commitment device. It is small enough to keep, and just annual enough to make you look at what you are keeping.

What UK makers actually keep, cut and pay for

I have been asking other UK creatives about their own annual website costs, partly to reassure myself that I am not alone in treating a domain like a small standing order to my own practice. The pattern is less about big budgets and more about what survives the cut.

A ceramicist in Bristol told me she keeps three things: the domain, a simple portfolio site and a proper email address. She cut analytics because it made her check numbers instead of make work. She still pays for hosting and a backup service, because losing images of sold pieces would be worse than losing the site itself.

A type designer in Leeds runs a one-page site with a short statement, a few specimens and a contact link. He pays for the domain and a font licence, and almost nothing else. No newsletter. No blog. No booking system. His view is that the site should be easy to keep alive during busy months, otherwise it becomes another unfinished project.

A photographer in Glasgow keeps a portfolio host, a domain and an email account, and pays for a small print-shop integration. She cut paid social scheduling and a premium stock subscription. Her reasoning was blunt: the site sells prints, the feed creates awareness, and the scheduling tool was just a subscription that made her feel organised without changing much.

An illustrator in Norwich keeps a domain, email and a shop plugin, but dropped a course platform and a paid gallery service. She said the domain is the last thing she would cancel, because it is the one part of her online presence that does not change its rules every few months.

That seems to be the common shape. The domain stays. The tools churn. Hosting, email, backups and shop plugins come and go depending on what the work needs. The address is the bit that holds the whole thing together, even when the whole thing is only three pages and a contact form.

Renting attention and owning an address

None of this is an argument against social platforms. In 2026 they are still where a lot of people find work, and pretending otherwise would be silly. But there is a difference between renting attention and owning an address. A feed is a place where you are shown. A domain is a place where you are found, linked to and, ideally, remembered.

That difference matters more when the platforms get noisy. A link in a bio is not a home. It is a signpost. The domain is the bit you can put on a invoice, a business card, a print label or a CV without wondering whether the profile will still look the same next year. It is also the bit you can change without asking permission. You can move hosts, change the design, add a page, delete a page or leave it alone for six months. The address keeps working.

For a creative practice, that is a quietly useful kind of stability. Not stability in the sense of steady income or endless inspiration. Stability in the sense of a fixed place to point at when someone asks what you do.

The ritual is the review, not the payment

The renewal is also a forced pause. Once a year, a small email arrives and asks whether you still want the thing. That is more useful than it sounds. It gives you a natural moment to check what is live, what is stale and what you have been meaning to fix since spring.

This year I used the £9.99 as an excuse to do three things. I updated the about page so it no longer reads like a slightly different person wrote it. I removed a project that I was proud of once but would not show anyone now. And I checked that the contact form actually sends emails, which is the sort of maintenance that feels boring until it is the only thing that matters.

None of that required a new brand, a content calendar or a five-year plan. It required twenty minutes and a reason to look. The renewal provided the reason.

A small vote for the practice

I am not suggesting every UK creative needs a website. Some practices run perfectly well through word of mouth, a shop front, an agent or a platform that suits them. But for me, the domain is a small vote for the practice. It says that even in a quiet month, I am keeping a light on.

So the £9.99 has gone through again. The site is still there. The work is not finished, the design could be better and the about page will probably need another pass before spring. But the address is mine for another year, and that is enough of a ritual for now.