Every agency arrives at care-plan pricing the same way: a quick look at three competitors’ websites, a wince, and a number slightly below the lowest one. Then it sits there for four years while the work quietly grows.
The problem is that almost nobody publishes real numbers, so the whole industry calibrates on the few who do, and the ones who do tend to be the cheapest. Here’s a more honest way to arrive at a figure.
Start with what you’re actually carrying
A care plan isn’t a bundle of tasks. It’s a transfer of risk. The client stops worrying about the site and you start. That’s what they’re buying, and it’s why “how long does it take me?” is the wrong starting question.
Work out the floor first, because it’s rarely as low as people assume:
- Hard costs. Hosting, backups, uptime monitoring, an SSL if it isn’t free, plugin and theme licences, your management and reporting tooling. Per site, per month.
- Predictable time. Updates, checking things still work afterwards, the monthly report, the occasional “can you just” that you don’t bill for.
- The unpredictable bit. Not the average month, the bad one. A hacked site, a failed update, a host falling over the week you’re away. Price as though one client in ten has a bad month each year, because roughly one does.
If your number doesn’t cover the bad month, you haven’t priced a care plan. You’ve priced a hosting reseller account and taken on unlimited liability for free.
Three tiers that tend to work
Rough shapes rather than gospel, for a UK agency looking after small-business sites:
Essential, around £30 to £60 a month. Hosting, backups, updates, uptime, security patching, a monthly report. No content changes. This is the floor, and it only works at volume with genuinely automated tooling.
Standard, around £80 to £200 a month. The above plus a defined slice of hands-on time, say an hour, for content edits and small fixes. This is where most small-business retainers should sit, and where most agencies under-charge worst.
Ecommerce or business-critical, £250 upwards. Sites where downtime costs the client money directly. Faster response commitments, staging, more testing. Price the response time, not the task list.
Two things to hold onto. First, the cheapest tier should be slightly uncomfortable to sell, or it’s too cheap. Second, the gap between tiers is not more hours; it’s a shorter promise on how quickly you respond.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Pricing on time spent. It sounds rigorous and it punishes you for being good at your job: the better your tooling, the less time it takes, the less you can justify charging. That is a strange incentive to build a business on.
Price on what the client no longer has to think about. Two hours of your attention isn’t the product. A site that stays up, stays current, and stays out of their inbox is the product.
Why the report is what makes it defensible
Here’s the uncomfortable part. A care plan is invisible when it’s working. Nothing broke, so nothing happened, so what exactly is the money for? That question always arrives eventually, usually in month fourteen, usually by email, usually beginning “just wondering whether we still need”.
The agencies who hold their pricing are the ones who make the work visible every month, before the question gets asked. Not a changelog of plugin versions, which proves you were busy rather than useful, but the things the client actually cares about: the site was up, it was quick, it was secure, and it brought in this many enquiries. That reframes the invoice from a maintenance charge into a business expense with a number attached.
If you want the long version of what belongs in that report, we wrote one: what to put in a monthly client report. And if your current monthly email is a list of updates applied, there’s a better shape for it.
The short version
Work out your floor honestly, including the bad month. Add the risk you’re absorbing. Land on three tiers where the gap is response time rather than hours. Then send something every month that shows what the money bought, so the renewal conversation happens on your terms rather than in a moment of doubt.
The number matters less than whether you can defend it. Most agencies can’t, because nobody ever sees the work.
That last part is the bit SendTidings handles: a plain monthly report and a live white-labelled dashboard showing traffic, search, uptime, site health and real enquiries, branded as you, across every client you look after. See the plans, or read more about reporting for WordPress agencies.
— Josh
