Ask ten agencies what their monthly "maintenance" fee covers and you will get ten vague answers and one spreadsheet. The fee is often the most profitable line on their invoice precisely because nobody can say what it is for.
My care plans are published, with the figures, on the price list. This post is the explanation behind them.
What every plan includes
Essential is £95 a month. It covers four things, and all four are things you would notice the day they stopped.
- Hosting. The site is served from a global edge network, so it is fast everywhere and does not fall over when you get busy.
- Security updates. The platform and its dependencies are kept current. On a static build there is no plugin layer to be hacked through, which is most of why this is cheap.
- Backups. The content and the code are versioned, so any change can be rolled back and nothing is ever lost.
- Uptime monitoring. If the site goes down, I know before you do.
Plus thirty minutes of changes a month: a new price, a replaced photo, a reworded paragraph. The small things that otherwise never get done because asking feels like a bother.
What the bigger plans add
Active is £295 a month. It takes the changes up to two hours, covers content updates rather than just corrections, and adds a monthly performance report so you can see what the site is actually doing: visitors, where they came from, what they did.
Managed is £950 a month. It adds a day a month of development, priority turnaround, and a quarterly search review. That is for a business whose site is a working part of the operation and changes every month: new pages, new integrations, new campaigns.
What is deliberately not in any of them
A lock-in. Nothing is compulsory, and you can stop any plan with thirty days' notice. The code, the domain and the content are yours whether you are on a plan or not.
Hidden scope creep. A new page, a new feature or a structural change is not "maintenance". If something you ask for is bigger than the hours in your plan, I say so and price it before it starts, not after.
A reason to keep the site fragile. Some monthly fees exist because the site needs constant attention to stay up. Mine are cheap because the sites do not. A static build with no plugin layer is boring to run, and boring is what you want.
Two questions to ask anyone quoting you a monthly fee
- "If I cancel, what do I keep?" The honest answer is everything. If the answer involves a migration fee, a licence or a locked CMS, you are paying rent, not for care.
- "What happens in a month when nothing breaks?" If the answer is "nothing", you are paying for insurance against a fragile site. Ask why the site is fragile.
Paul Redman runs Redman Studio, an independent web design and engineering studio in Watford, Hertfordshire. The three care plans and every other fee are published here.