How much to charge for website maintenance, per month

By Mateus Renner · Updated October 28, 2026 · 8 min read

You want a number. The market will give you one: most published care plans sit around $100–150 a month. The problem is that the number tells you what updates and backups sell for, not what your hours cost, and the two only match if the plan contains almost no developer time.

The dollar figures from the example are hypothetical, built on a fictional two-person studio so the math is easy to check. Run your own costs in the free retainer pricing calculator as you read. If you'd rather see how the price gets reported to the client every month, the monthly report template is free.

What other studios charge for maintenance

There's no official price list, but there is one useful public data point. Kyle Van Deusen of The Admin Bar reviewed more than 100 agency care plan pages in 2025 and found few plans under $75, most between $100 and $150 a month, and a top end around $250 for plans that didn't bundle the website itself, SEO or other services. That review is reported in this article by We.Inc, which also notes that published plans aimed at site owners run from under $100 to about $600 a month. We haven't verified the underlying data; treat it as a band, not a benchmark.

Look at what fills those plans: core and plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security scans, and sometimes an hour or so of edits. On the higher plans, the thing that changes between tiers is usually developer time. That's the useful lesson. The market prices the routine work low because much of it is automated, and starts charging real money only where a person has to think.

Why a $49–150 plan can't include developer work

Divide the plan price by your hourly rate and you get the hours the plan actually pays for. Do it once and most pricing debates end there.

In our studio, a stable site with little campaign activity uses about 3–4 hours a month: updates, backups, monitoring, security patches and small fixes, with nobody asking for a new page. Here is what common price points pay for against that, at the example rate of $96/hour:

There are only three ways a $49–150 plan works. You automate nearly everything and serve many sites with the same stack, which is a hosting business more than a studio. You quietly do less than the plan implies, which shows up the day something breaks. Or you sell something other than hours, such as a managed platform. All three are legitimate businesses. None of them includes building a landing page for Thursday's campaign.

If a prospect points at a cheap plan, don't argue the price. Compare hours delivered, not monthly fees. If automated updates and a backup are all the site needs, the cheap plan is a fine choice and you can say so.

Your own number, in three lines

The full method, with every input explained, is in how to price website maintenance retainers. The short version for the fictional studio:

1. Fixed monthly costs, including both salaries: $14,000. Add a 30% margin: $14,000 × 1.30 = $18,200.
2. Billable hours: 2 people × 160 hours × 59.4% billable ≈ 190 hours a month. Nobody bills 160.
3. Hourly rate: $18,200 ÷ 190 ≈ $95.75, rounded to $96. Hours beyond the plan are billed at 1.25x, $120 an hour (or 1.5x, $144, if your capacity is tight).

Then check the market for hourly work, not for care plans. If similar studios charge $85–150 an hour, $96 is in range. If your cost-based rate comes out higher than your market pays, dropping the rate only means losing money on every hour. Cut costs, raise utilization, or sell to clients who compare your fee with agency retainers and ad spend instead of with a plugin-update service.

What each plan size buys

Price per hour of capacity, not per plugin or per site. A plan is a bank of hours the client buys every month, sized to how much their team ships. In practice there are two shapes: about 3–4 hours for a stable site, and up to about 20 hours for a marketing team that asks for something most weeks. Above 20 hours, the work is usually better run as a project.

For a sales page or proposal, three named plans are enough. This is the plan block from the kit's proposal template, filled in with the example rate:

Notice that the hourly rate is the same in every column. Don't discount the bigger plans per hour: the client on 20 hours already gets reserved capacity and priority on their campaigns. Keep the rules identical across tiers too (rollover, overage, the monthly report, the line between developer work and content the client's team edits in the CMS) and vary only the hours, plus at most one feature such as after-hours response.

Each plan size also has to fit your capacity. At 190 billable hours, a Partner client takes about 10.5% of the studio, so nine of them would fill almost the whole month with no room for overage, new sales or a sick week.

Hosting goes on its own line

If you host the site, don't fold the server into the plan price. Bill it at your actual cost plus 20–30%, as a separate invoice line. A server, CDN and backup storage that cost you $48 a month become $60 at a 25% markup, so a Growth client on your hosting pays $960 + $60 = $1,020 a month.

The markup covers payment fees, taxes on that revenue and the responsibility of keeping it running. It doesn't cover your time: hours spent managing the server still come out of the bank. Keeping the line separate also means that when your provider raises prices, you adjust one line with notice instead of reopening the whole plan.

When to charge more: work for the marketing team

The plans above are priced on hours, so “charging more” mostly means selling more hours to the clients who need them. Those are clients with a marketing team. They don't ask for plugin updates; they ask for things like these (typical figures from the kit's illustrative cases, not measurements from one job):

• A campaign landing page by Thursday, built as a reusable template with UTM handling and a conversion event: about 7 hours.
• A demo-request form that has to reach the CRM, with campaign tags and a fallback if the API call fails: about 4 hours.
• Ads showing no conversions after a consent-banner update, plus a headline A/B test: about 5 hours.

A month with the landing page and the form fix is 11 hours. On a 10-hour plan, that's one hour from rollover, or one hour of overage at $120 with the client's approval in advance. Three months of that pattern is the moment to suggest a 12-hour plan ($1,152 a month) at the usage review.

This is also where the market band stops being relevant. A marketing manager compares $960 a month with what an agency charges for the same landing page, or with a week of ad spend going to a broken form. The base work (updates, security, backups, uptime) is still in the plan. It's just not what you lead with.

Whatever you charge, write it down in the same words everywhere: the proposal, Schedule A of the maintenance contract, and the hours table in the monthly report. A price the client can see being used every month is a price that survives renewal.

Mistakes when setting a maintenance price

• Copying the market band for developer work. $150 a month is a fair price for updates and backups. It isn't a price for a campaign page.
• Pricing per plugin, per page or per site. Clients can't predict their bill and you can't predict your hours.
• Unlimited small edits. Nobody agrees on what small means. Sell hours.
• Leaving your own salary out of costs. The rate looks competitive and the business pays you nothing.
• Hosting folded into the fee. When server costs rise, you absorb it or renegotiate everything.
• No yearly adjustment. Tie the rate to CPI or a fixed 3–5% from the first contract.

Related

• How to price website maintenance retainersThe full cost-plus method, with overage and rollover worked through.
• Retainer pricing calculatorYour hourly rate and plan prices from your own costs, in the browser.
• Website maintenance contract templateWhere the price goes: Schedule A, hour bank and overage clauses.