The standard $200/month "website maintenance" plan is insurance for nothing.
You pay it. Twelve months later you've called the studio once. They've done a WordPress update and a plugin update. The site is exactly as broken as it was before. The studio is exactly as un-engaged as they were before. You renew because cancelling feels harder than paying.
This is the genre. It exists because studios need recurring revenue and clients want to feel like someone's watching the site. Almost no actual work gets done.
This post is what real maintenance looks like, what we charge for, and what we don't. The honest version.
What the $200/month plan actually covers
A typical "basic maintenance" plan:
- WordPress core updates (an automated thing that needs no studio)
- Plugin updates (same)
- Daily backups (an automated thing, free with your hosting)
- "Uptime monitoring" (free with UptimeRobot)
- "Security monitoring" (means nothing specific)
- "Emergency support" (which is usually "respond within 48 hours")
Add it up: you're paying for an automation suite that costs the studio about $5/month to run, plus reassurance.
We've seen these contracts for sites we audited. The pattern is consistent: the studio does an update every month or two, sends a "we updated your plugins" email, and that's the entire relationship. When something actually breaks, the studio is either slow to respond or quotes additional billable work.
This isn't fraud. It's the industry standard. We just think it's the wrong product.
What real maintenance is
A site that's actually being maintained needs four things:
1. Real monitoring. Not just uptime. Performance trending (is LCP creeping up?), error rate trending (are 5xx responses increasing?), SEO health (are any pages getting deindexed?), security advisories (are dependencies vulnerable?). Someone reviews this weekly and acts on what they find.
2. Genuine ongoing work. A site is never finished. There's always something: copy that's gone stale, a section that underperforms, a new section to add, a third-party that changed their API. Real maintenance is a small but constant stream of work.
3. Direct line of communication. A Slack channel, a shared inbox, a phone number. Something that doesn't require submitting a ticket and waiting 48 hours. The "emergency response in 4 hours" promise is meaningless if the rest of the relationship is asynchronous and slow.
4. Investment in the site's future. Beyond just keeping it alive: thinking about what's next, what could be better, what new opportunities the site is missing. The studio that built it has context nobody else has; that context is valuable when used.
If the maintenance plan doesn't include all four, you're paying for automation you could run yourself.
The plans we actually offer
Three tiers we use, with what each gets you:
Tier 1: monitoring + emergency support ($300-500/month)
What it covers:
- Real monitoring: weekly review of Lighthouse, Search Console, error tracking, and dependency vulnerabilities.
- A monthly written report summarising what we found and what we did.
- Emergency response: 4 hours during business hours, next morning otherwise. We actually log into your infrastructure when something breaks.
- 2-3 hours/month of small fixes (broken links, copy updates, minor bug fixes).
What it doesn't cover:
- Feature work, new pages, design changes. Those are quoted separately.
This tier is for sites that work and need to keep working. Most clients on this tier need us occasionally, not constantly.
Tier 2: monitoring + active support ($800-1,500/month)
What it covers:
- Everything in Tier 1.
- 8-12 hours/month of active work: new sections, content updates, optimisation, A/B tests, additions.
- Quarterly review meetings where we discuss what's working, what isn't, and what to do next.
- Performance improvements applied proactively (not waiting for the team to ask).
What it doesn't cover:
- Major rebuilds. Those are still separate projects.
This tier is for sites that need real ongoing investment, but not enough to justify a full-time engineer. Many B2B SaaS marketing sites fit here.
Tier 3: embedded support (custom pricing)
What it covers:
- A specific engineer or designer is allocated to your project for a set number of hours per week.
- They show up to your team meetings if helpful. They have access to your tools.
- It's effectively part-time contracting, with the benefit that the same person who built the site is the one maintaining it.
This tier is for products where the marketing site, web app, or both are core to the business and the team isn't ready to hire a full engineer.
What we don't charge for
Things that are sometimes billable elsewhere that we include:
- Hosting issues. If Vercel or Cloudflare has an outage affecting our deploy, we monitor and notify you. Free.
- Routine dependency updates that don't require code changes. The Renovate bot opens PRs; we merge them. Free.
- Quick questions that take under 10 minutes to answer. Don't watch the clock for "can you check why this looks weird in Safari." Just ask.
- Backup verification. We confirm backups actually restore once a quarter. Free.
- Security advisories. If a CVE is announced for a library we use, we evaluate whether it affects you. Free.
The principle: routine maintenance should be included. Billable hours are for net-new work, not for keeping the lights on.
A case study
A B2B SaaS client signed onto our Tier 2 plan last year. They'd been on a competitor's "basic maintenance" before us. The handoff data:
- 14 months on the previous plan.
- 6 emails exchanged total.
- 3 plugin updates applied.
- One incident: a contact form stopped working for 9 days before anyone noticed. The previous studio fixed it in 2 hours when asked.
Their first quarter on our plan:
- Weekly reviews caught a Lighthouse Performance drop (from 96 to 78) caused by a recent feature deploy. We diagnosed and fixed in 4 hours.
- A new section was needed for an upcoming product launch. We built it in our included hours.
- Search Console showed a new "soft 404" warning on a renamed page. We added a redirect. 30 minutes.
- The team's CSV export feature broke after a dependency update. We rolled back, investigated, patched. 6 hours.
That's the kind of work that doesn't get done on a $200/month plan because there's no slack for it. The site stays alive, the team's velocity stays unblocked.
When you don't need a maintenance plan
Honest cases where the right answer is "no plan":
- The site is small and stable. A 5-page marketing site with no forms, no integrations, and no traffic doesn't need a $500/month plan. It needs $0 and an annual check-in.
- You have an in-house engineer who can handle it. The plan is for teams without engineering capacity.
- You're between phases. If you're about to rebuild the site, paying for ongoing maintenance on the doomed version is throwing money.
- You want a different studio's plan. Some studios specialise in maintenance and do it well. We're not offended; the right plan for you is the right plan for you.
We turn down maintenance contracts when we don't think they'd be worth it for the client. The recurring revenue isn't worth signing up for a relationship that won't produce value.
The summary
- Most "maintenance plans" in the industry are automation rented at a markup.
- Real maintenance includes monitoring, ongoing work, direct communication, and investment in the future.
- We offer three tiers and turn down clients who don't need them.
- The right plan is the cheapest one that actually delivers the work you need.
If you're paying for maintenance and not sure what you're getting, ask your studio for a one-page report of what they've done in the last six months. If they can't produce one, the plan isn't doing anything.
If you want a real maintenance relationship instead of a paid subscription to nothing, start a conversation. We'll tell you honestly which tier fits, or that none of them does.