Owning a tour for five years against renting one
Owning is a purchase and renting is a subscription, and over five years the difference is less about the money than about where the risk sits. Owned: you pay once, you carry the hosting and the maintenance, and nothing stops when you stop paying anyone. Rented: you pay less at the start, somebody else carries the hosting and the maintenance, and the tour ends when the payments do. We sell the first, and this post is written on the assumption that you can tell when a supplier is only arguing one side.
The two shapes, year by year
| Point in time | Owned outright | Rented from a platform |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | The capture and the build, once. Plus your hosting, if you run it yourself. | A smaller first payment, usually per active space, per seat or per year. |
| Years 2 to 5 | Hosting and a domain renewal. No licence, no seat, no platform fee. | The same payment again, four more times, at whatever the price is by then. |
| If you stop paying | Nothing happens. There is nothing to stop paying. | The tour comes down, on whatever notice the terms allow. |
| If the supplier stops | Nothing happens. You hold the files. | It depends entirely on how the wind-down is handled. |
| If you want to move it | Copy the folder somewhere else. | You can move whatever the export lets you move. |
| If a browser change breaks something | Somebody has to fix it, and you have to find that somebody. | The platform fixes it once, for everyone, and you do nothing. |
The last row is the one that runs the other way, and it is real. It is also why this comparison is worth doing properly rather than as an advertisement.
What self-hosting actually costs you
The owned column is not free after year one and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. Here is the bill, in the order it usually bites.
- A hosting bill. Small — a folder of static files is about as cheap as web hosting gets — but not zero, and it is yours to remember every year.
- A domain renewal. The most common way a self-hosted anything disappears is an unrenewed domain, not a technical failure. It is an administrative risk wearing a technical costume.
- A backup. The folder is only as safe as the number of places it exists in. One copy on one laptop is not ownership; it is a single point of failure with your name on it.
- Nobody improving it in the background. A platform ships player changes to every tour it serves. A folder handed over in March is the same folder in five years. The property that makes it durable and the property that makes it frozen are the same property, and you should want that trade knowingly.
- Somebody to call when the ground moves. Browsers change. When one breaks something inside a delivered tour, an owner needs a person and a subscriber has that included in the price.
- Analytics you wire yourself. There is no dashboard to log into. We can wire your own property in at build time — €0.50 per distinct connection, plus €50 once if you have no property yet — and it reports to you, on your property, rather than to a service you rent.
The arithmetic, which you can do without us
We publish our rates and we do not publish what any particular job came to, because that is between us and the client who paid it. What you can do in about a minute is the sum yourself. Count the positions your building needs — one per point somebody should be able to stand in and look around. Then apply the published rates: €40 for each of the first ten photographs, €30 for each one after, a €160 minimum, with VAT on top. That gives you a one-time figure.
- Take that one-time figure, and add five years of your own hosting and one domain. That is the owned column.
- Take the annual price of the alternative and multiply it by five. Then ask yourself whether it will still be that price in year four, and whether the plan you are on will still exist.
- Add to the rented column the cost of whatever happens if it stops: the rebuild, the re-embedding, the listings that need updating, the printed material with a dead link on it.
- Now compare. Two numbers and one contingency, which is more honesty than either side of this argument usually offers.
Every figure in this post is either our own published rate card or a description of a structure. There is no third-party statistic in it, deliberately: the ones in circulation in this industry mostly do not survive being traced, and we set out which ones and why in the statistics we will not repeat.
Two things about the owned column we have not answered
Underneath the owned column sit two questions we have not published answers to, and leaving them out would make this post exactly the kind of one-sided argument it is complaining about. First, whether hosting on our subdomain is time-limited: it is billed at €5 per GB a month, we have never set an end date, and we have also never written down that there is not one. Second, whether a client receives the file the tour could be re-edited from, or only the built output that runs. The first decides how long a convenience lasts. The second decides whether owning your tour means you can host it or means you can change it. Both are listed, unanswered and marked as unanswered, in what happens if we stop trading.
Where the five-year question actually gets decided
In practice nobody sits down in year one and models five years of anything. The decision gets made retrospectively, in one of three moments, and it is worth knowing which one is coming.
- The website rebuild
- A new agency arrives in year three and rebuilds the site. If the tour is a folder, it moves across with everything else and the agency bills an hour for it. If it is an embed pointing at a platform account nobody can find the login for, it quietly does not come back. This is the most common way a tour dies and it has nothing to do with the tour.
- The procurement or audit file
- An institution buying a tour is often buying a record it has to still hold years later, independently of any supplier. A file satisfies that. A licence to view something on somebody else’s server does not, and the person who has to answer for it is rarely the person who bought it.
- The sale, or the handover
- A building changes hands, or a department changes owner. Everything that is a file transfers with the paperwork. Everything that is an account has to be found, identified, credentialed and migrated, by somebody who was not there when it was set up.
Send the address and roughly which spaces matter and you get a station count and a fixed price, which is the only figure in this comparison that is actually ours to give you. The rest of it is arithmetic you should do yourself, on our published rates and on whatever the alternative is charging this year.
Questions people ask
- Is owning always cheaper over five years?
- Not always, and it depends on the size of the job and the plan you are comparing it with. A very small tour on a cheap annual plan can stay cheaper for a long time. What owning is, always, is finite: you know the whole number on day one, and no part of it is a decision somebody else gets to make later.
- What does hosting a tour myself actually involve?
- Uploading a folder to a web host and pointing a domain or subdomain at it. There is no database to configure, no runtime to install and no build step. Any host that can serve a static website can serve a tour, which is most of them, including the one your site already sits on.
- Who fixes it if something breaks in five years?
- Whoever you ask. That is the honest answer and it is the genuine disadvantage of owning. Our intention is to publish a notice when a browser or platform change affects a delivered tour, saying what changed and what to do about it, and we would rather state that as an intention than dress it up as a service-level agreement we have not written.
- Do you charge anything yearly?
- Not on the tour. There is no subscription, no per-view charge and no renewal on it, and if you host the files yourself there is nothing further to pay. Hosting on our server is a separate monthly line, at €5 per GB of storage per month. If you later want something added — new rooms after a refurbishment, another language, analytics — that is quoted as work when you ask for it, from the same published rates, and the parts that have not changed are not re-charged.
