How to price a website care plan
The recurring revenue argument usually gets made badly, as a favour to the client or as insurance against a disaster nobody expects. Here is the arithmetic, the three tiers that actually sell, and what to say in the month when nothing broke.
What a care plan actually is
A care plan is a standing agreement that the site stays alive, current and someone else's problem. It is not a support ticket allowance and it is not insurance, and the two most common ways of selling it fail because they describe it as one of those.
Sold as an allowance, it invites the client to audit their usage, and a client who is counting minutes will cancel in the first quiet month. Sold as insurance, it invites them to gamble, and most will: websites do not visibly break often enough to make the fear argument land.
What it actually is: you holding capacity open. That framing survives contact with a client, because it is true and because it explains the price.
Start from what it costs you to be available
The moment you price a care plan by the hours you expect to spend, you have built something that loses money in every month a client actually calls and feels like theft in every month they do not.
Price it instead as a fraction of a retained day. Work out what holding a day a month in reserve costs you in billable capacity, divide by the number of sites sharing that reserve, and you have a floor. Everything above the floor is the value of the client not having to think about it.
A worked example
A three-person studio, $240,000 of revenue needed, 160 billable days each. Here is the floor, in full.
Three-person studio, 40 sites under management
- Revenue the business needs
- $240,000
- Billable days available (3 x 160)
- 480
- Day rate floor ($240,000 / 480)
- $500
- Capacity held in reserve
- 12 days/yr
- Cost of that reserve (12 x $500)
- $6,000
- Sites sharing the reserve
- 40
$12.50 is not the price. It is the number below which the plan costs you money before a single backup, licence or uptime monitor is paid for. Most agencies discover their existing “hosting and bits” arrangement is sitting almost exactly on that line, which is why it has never felt like it was worth anything.
Run the same arithmetic on your own numbers if your team size or day rate is different.
Three tiers, and why the middle one exists
Most agencies build two tiers and watch everyone pick the cheap one. Three works because the middle tier is the one you are actually selling; the other two exist to make it look reasonable.
Essentials
- Hosting and SSL
- Daily backup, 30-day retention
- Core and plugin updates
- Uptime monitoring
- 48-hour response
Care
- Everything in Essentials
- 30 minutes of changes a month
- Quarterly performance check
- Form and analytics monitoring
- Next-working-day response
Partner
- Everything in Care
- 2 hours of changes a month
- Quarterly strategy call
- Priority in the build queue
- Same-day response
Illustrative figures for your own pricing, not AgencyGenius pricing. The top tier does not need to sell. It needs to exist, so the middle one is a sensible choice rather than the expensive one.
What belongs in a tier, and what never does
The fastest way to make a care plan unprofitable is to let it quietly absorb work that should have been quoted. Draw the line in writing, in the first conversation.
Inside the plan
- Updates, patches and backups
- Uptime and SSL monitoring
- Text and image swaps on existing pages
- Adding a team member or a testimonial
- Fixing something that broke on its own
- The monthly report
Quoted separately
- New pages and new templates
- Design changes to existing pages
- Anything involving a new integration
- Migrating to a new platform
- SEO or campaign work
- Fixing something a third party broke
Unused change time does not roll over, and you should say so in the first conversation rather than the fourth. Rollover turns a retainer into a bank account, and clients who treat it as a bank account eventually withdraw eight months at once.
The month when nothing broke
This is the conversation that kills care plans, and it always arrives around month seven. The answer is not to invent work. The answer is to have been sending a monthly note the whole time that lists what ran: backups taken, updates applied, uptime percentage, forms received, page speed. Four lines. It costs nothing and it reframes the question from “what did you do” to “what would have happened if you had not”.
If you cannot produce that list without an afternoon of digging, that is the actual problem, and it is worth fixing before you raise anyone's price.
Moving existing clients onto a plan
Every agency has a back catalogue of clients paying nothing, or paying a few dollars a year for a domain, who still email when the site goes down. Migrating them is the single highest-return afternoon most agencies never spend.
Do it in three moves. Start with the ones who already email you, because they are already consuming the service and will recognise the description. Give a date rather than an option, because an option invites a negotiation and a date invites a question. And grandfather the oldest handful at the lowest tier rather than losing them; a client on Essentials is worth more than a client on nothing and takes the same five minutes to keep.
Expect to lose one or two. Those are the clients who were never going to pay for the work you were already doing for free, and they were costing you the most.
Common questions
How much should a website care plan cost?
For a small business brochure site, $39 to $129 a month covers hosting, backups, updates and small changes. Sites with e-commerce, integrations or heavy traffic sit between $200 and $600. Below about $13 per site per month, most agencies are subsidising the arrangement once the reserved capacity is counted.
What should a website maintenance plan include?
At minimum: hosting, SSL, daily backups with a stated retention period, platform and plugin updates, uptime monitoring, and a defined response time. Anything above that, such as content changes, performance work or strategy calls, is what separates the tiers.
Should unused hours roll over?
No. Rollover turns a retainer into a bank account the client can draw down at the worst possible moment, and it converts a recurring revenue line into a deferred liability. Say so at the start rather than when someone asks to cash in eight months.
How do I sell a care plan to a client who never asked for one?
Describe what you are already doing for them without charging, then give a start date rather than a choice. Clients who email you when the site breaks have already accepted the service; they have simply never been billed for it.
Care plans that bill themselves
AgencyGenius turns a signed plan into a recurring subscription, an invoice schedule and a renewal date you do not have to remember.