If their company can do well with this website, her psychology practice can do as well.
Some of the best services I got was from professionals with no or mundane online presence. Instead, their abilities and expertise moved them to the top in their respective fields, and the whole community knows how and when to reach them.
So, maybe a shiny website is not a hard-requirement for a good psychology practice, IDK.
So, the thing is, maybe this was her way to explore new things and decompress while doing some mundane thing from her perspective for free. Sometimes it's not that $20 which you can pay without any negative side-effects, but the desire to see how far the thing goes without the token, or just because you don't feel any urgency to do the task, so that $20 looks like an unnecessary waste.
I have been in both places.
If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? Otherwise, she probably shouldn't be spending any time on it herself either, given the opportunity cost.
Obviously she decided otherwise, I just find it kind of surprising.
Like, in general, I'm always kind of surprised at what people are and aren't willing to pay for. People will suffer through horrible full screen ads in mobile games instead of paying $5 one time to turn them off. And they'll do this on a phone that costs $1,000+. I don't know their financial situation, but I would buy a cheaper phone and get rid of the ads...
I know people who won't subscribe to a service, but go through great pains to get the thing the service offers (another brand, similar yet inferior service, etc.).
For example, if an application I use has ads (i.e. a game), and it needs a subscription to remove these ads, I'll simply won't install it, or get the paid version of it from the start. For me, playing a game with no end and paying monthly to "hide" advertisements doesn't worth it.
* You propose I buy your ¤4 overhyped toothbrush. If I spend 10 minutes digging around, I could find a sub-¤1 toothbrush. Effectively I'm doing 10 minutes of work at less than minimum wage in order to avoid owning the premium toothbrush. Do I do this? I might! The reason is that I want no part in your hype.
* You offer me a loyalty scheme that will genuinely save me money if I participate. I only have to pay attention to your offers and routinely identify myself and I might get 10% savings, all the time. I decline this because you don't get to use my brain cycles for your profit, even if I profit too.
* You offer me a free thing that happens to track me and funnels data to data brokers. I decline it even though it does me no actual harm at all, because I don't want you to make money from personal facts about me, even when the facts are robotically aggregated and anonymised. Ethics are at stake: ethically speaking, you can just piss off. That is worth more than a free gadget, and it's not even an equation.
Did you notice that this is completely unrelated to the idea that the $20 would turn a profit for the business?
It's just the argument "$20 isn't very much money, so why not spend it?".