Who owns the website when you pay monthly?
Depends on the contract. You should always own your domain, content and accounts. The code depends on whether there’s a buyout clause.
The three that have to be in your name
The code is what everyone argues about, and the cheapest thing in the deal to replace. What you cannot rebuild is the domain every link points at, the Business Profile carrying every review parents have left you, and the copy that took four rounds to get right. Those three have to sit in accounts you can log into without asking anyone.
| Asset | The check, this afternoon | A bad answer |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | Log into the registrar yourself — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare — and read the registrant field. ICANN’s word for the party holding the rights to a name is registrant; admin and tech contact are not that. | No registrar login, or one where the registrant is the shop. A public WHOIS lookup may not settle it — registration data is redacted where law requires it, and may be redacted anyway. |
| Accounts | Business Profile: you are the primary owner, not a manager. Analytics: Administrator at the account level, not on one property. Search Console: a verified owner. | Your access arrived as an invitation from the agency’s account — which means it can be withdrawn from there. |
| Content | Photos, video, the 6am schedule, the words on every page — as files, on a drive you control. | The only copy of your copy is a page on a server you have no credentials for. |
Search Console hides a trap: removing someone from the user list does nothing while their verification token is still in place — a deleted owner can re-verify off a token still sitting in your DNS or on your server. Pull the token, not just the user.
Business Profile has a delay, not a trap: a newly added owner waits seven days before they can transfer primary ownership or remove other owners. Get yourself made primary owner while everyone is still friendly.
Why the code is the part in dispute
The part that surprises people: copyright vests initially in the author — whoever actually made the thing. Paying the invoice does not move it. Two mechanisms in the US statute do, and they are not interchangeable.
Work made for hire is a defined term, not a description: where it applies, the commissioning party is the author from the start. It covers an employee working inside their job, and commissioned work in nine listed categories, none of them obviously a website: collective works, motion pictures, translations, supplementary works, compilations, instructional texts, tests, test answers, atlases — and only under a written agreement signed by both parties.
Assignment is the wider route, with its own requirement: a transfer of copyright ownership is not valid unless it is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights being conveyed.
So the clause worth looking for is the belt-and-braces one: the work is a work made for hire, and to the extent it does not qualify, it is hereby assigned to you. If your contract names one and not the other, or just says “you own your website,” that is the sentence to ask about. None of this is legal advice — it is vocabulary, so you can read your own paperwork and see which words carry weight. The contract governs, and an hour of a lawyer’s time on a clause you cannot parse is cheap.
What to ask before you sign
Four questions that expose a bad version of a monthly deal, including a bad version of ours.
- Is the buyout a number in the contract? “Market rate at exit” is not a price, it is a negotiation you will have from a weak position.
- What happens to the live site if I stop paying, and when? You want a date, not a mood.
- Does the buyout include design files and the licences for the fonts and stock photos? Licences do not always transfer with the code.
- Is the build portable, or does it only run on the shop’s platform? A site nobody else can host is unbuyable whatever the clause says.
Our own answers, so you can hold this page to its test. On a subscription, MatGrowth owns and maintains the build while you are a client; your domain, content and accounts are in your name throughout. Buy out at any point for $3,800, less half the monthly fees already paid. Cancel without buying out and the built site goes offline 30 days after your last payment — you keep the domain, content, accounts, copy and assets.
The trade-off you are actually making
That is a rental with an option to buy, and it deserves the name. You skip several thousand up front and somebody else carries maintenance; in exchange the build is not an asset on your books, and the meter runs. If you already have cash and someone in-house to edit the site, buying on day one is the cheaper path to ownership. Most single-location schools do not have that person — which is why the subscription is the default, and the buyout sits next to it on the pricing page rather than behind a call.
Our judgment, not a finding: for most single-location schools the code is the least valuable thing in the contract. Which makes the better question not who owns the website but what walks out with me if I leave tomorrow, and what would it cost to replace the rest? A school that owns its domain, its accounts and its words can hire anyone and be back up quickly. A school that owns the code but not the domain is starting from zero with a folder of files.
Our answers to the four questions above, so you can hold us to them: the domain, the content and the accounts are yours from day one; we own the build while you are paying for it; the buyout is $3,800 less half of the monthly fees you have already paid; and if you cancel without buying, the site goes offline 30 days later. That last one is the real price of a $497 setup. The buyout terms.