My care plan is $49 a month. Here's every line of what that buys.

What the market actually charges

I'll start with the numbers I'm being compared against, because you should be able to check them.

Codeable, which runs a WordPress developer marketplace and publishes a maintenance pricing guide, puts small-business WordPress maintenance at $100 to $300 a month. Their own plans start at $140 a month for one hour of developer time, daily backups and malware scanning. The next tier up is $590. They also note that most providers bill emergency and ad-hoc work separately at $75 to $200 an hour on top.

A dedicated maintenance shop publishes three tiers: $95 a month for check-ups, security monitoring, monthly backups, updates and one hour of fixes; $195 for weekly backups and three hours; $395 for daily backups, six hours and a 24/7 emergency line. Twenty percent off if you pay annually.

Same guide, worth knowing: malware cleanup and a full site restore run $590 to $1,000 or more when it happens.

None of that is price gouging. Those are real numbers for real work. Hold onto that, because it matters for the next part.

My three tiers, in full

Month to month. Cancel whenever. For a site I built or one I've taken over hosting for.

Basic — $49/month. Uptime monitoring and alerts. SSL and domain-expiry watch. Hosting and build monitoring. Contact-form delivery checks. If the site goes down, an emergency fix within two business days. No content edits.

Standard — $89/month. Everything in Basic, plus up to three content edits a month — text, images, hours, pricing. A monthly broken-link and form test. A monthly uptime and traffic snapshot. One-business-day response.

Priority — $179/month. Everything in Standard, plus two to three hours a month of edits or small feature work. A monthly uptime and performance report. A quarterly performance audit. Same-business-day response.

That's it. Those are the pages on my site, unchanged, and the number on the plan is the number on the card.

Why the number is lower, honestly

Here's the part I actually want you to understand, because it's the whole answer and it isn't flattering to me.

Go back through that $95 tier. Security monitoring. Plugin and theme updates. Malware scanning. Database optimisation. Firewall. Broken plugin fixes.

Now ask what each of those is protecting you from.

A WordPress site is a PHP application with a database, an admin login on a known URL, and somewhere between ten and forty third-party plugins written by different people to different standards. Every one of those plugins is a security update waiting to happen, and an out-of-date plugin is one of the most common ways a small site gets hacked. The database gets bloated with revisions and transients and needs cleaning. The login page gets brute-forced constantly. Something breaks when WordPress updates and a plugin hasn't caught up.

That's a real job. Somebody has to do it, and $95 to $195 a month is a fair price for doing it properly.

I don't do that job, because there's nothing there to do. I hand-code sites as static HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No PHP. No database. No admin panel. No plugins. There's no login page to attack and no plugin to fall out of date, because there aren't any plugins. The site that's live is a folder of files sitting on a CDN.

So when I charge less than a WordPress care plan, I'm not undercutting anyone. I'm quoting a smaller job. Pretending otherwise would make me exactly the kind of salesperson this blog exists to warn you about.

So what am I actually doing for $49?

Four things, and they're all watching rather than fixing.

Uptime monitoring and alerts. Something checks the site on a schedule and tells me before it tells you. The value here isn't the check — checks are cheap and automated. It's that the alert reaches a person who knows how your site is built and can do something about it.

SSL and domain-expiry watch. This one is unglamorous and it's the one I'd least want to drop. An expired domain takes your site, your email and sometimes your Google listing down at once, and the recovery is worse than the outage. It usually happens because a renewal notice went to an old inbox. Somebody watching the calendar for you is worth more than it sounds like.

Hosting and build monitoring. Static sites deploy by building and pushing. Builds fail. When one does, the live site keeps serving the old version quite happily, which is exactly the problem — nothing looks broken, your change just silently didn't happen. Catching that is the job.

Contact-form delivery checks. The single most expensive silent failure a small-business site has. Your form still submits, still shows the thank-you message, and the email stops arriving. You don't find out from an error. You find out from a slow month. So the form gets tested on a schedule rather than trusted.

And a two-business-day emergency fix if it goes down. Note the window. Two business days is not a 24/7 emergency line, and I'm not going to describe it as one. If you need someone at 11pm on a Sunday, that's a different product from a different shop and you should buy it.

The honest summary of Basic: it is a smoke alarm, not a fire brigade. It watches four specific things that fail quietly and expensively, and it puts a person who knows your site on the other end of the alert. That's what forty-nine dollars buys, and I'd rather say that plainly than dress it up.

What isn't in it

Basic includes no content edits at all. Not "a couple, within reason." None. If you want text changed, that's Standard at $89, which covers three edits a month, or it's $100 an hour out of plan, quoted before I start.

There's no SEO in any care tier. Local SEO is a separate thing at $250 a month and up, and most businesses on a care plan don't need it.

No hosting migration, no redesign, no new pages, no new features. All of that is scoped and quoted separately. The full list is in the maintenance terms, which is a boring page that exists so nobody has to guess.

And nothing in any tier promises you traffic. A care plan keeps a site working. It doesn't grow anything.

Three times you shouldn't be paying me

Your site is on Wix or Squarespace. They already do the maintenance — it's baked into the monthly fee you're already paying. Adding a care plan on top is paying twice for the same work. I've written about what those platforms actually cost if you're weighing it up, but the care-plan question has a clean answer: don't.

Your site is genuinely static and you're comfortable. If you own a hand-coded site, you've got the domain in your own registrar account with auto-renew on, and you'd notice within a day if the contact form stopped, then Basic is insurance against a risk you're already managing. Some clients cancel after a year for exactly that reason and I don't argue with them.

You don't have a website worth maintaining. If the site is four years old, slow, and you already know it needs replacing, don't spend $588 a year keeping it alive. Put it toward the rebuild.

When $49 isn't the right tier

The opposite case, since I've spent this whole post arguing myself down.

If you change your own prices, hours or staff regularly, Basic will annoy you. Every edit becomes an hourly invoice and you'll resent both the invoice and the asking. Standard at $89 exists for that — three edits a month, no per-request negotiation. Most people who think they want Basic actually want Standard, and the ones who take Basic to save forty dollars usually move up inside six months.

Priority at $179 is for a site you're actively developing — you want two to three hours a month of real work, a performance report you'll read, and a same-day answer. If you're not going to use the hours, don't buy them.

The part that's actually worth more than the plan

You own everything. Every line of code, the domain and every account, handed to you at launch, in writing on the pricing page.

That's not a care-plan feature, but it's the thing that changes what the care plan means. If a maintenance plan is also the only way you can reach your own website, it isn't a service — it's a key to a door you supposedly own. Some shops build it that way on purpose. When you cancel with me you keep a working website, hosted wherever you like, and I'll hand over the deployment setup on the way out.

That's the difference between a care plan and a hostage situation, and it's worth checking before you sign one anywhere.

At a glance

The left-hand column comes from the two sources listed below this table, both checked 8 August 2026. My own prices are the ones on my pricing page, and they're the same numbers Stripe charges.