How to Price Website Care Plans: Costs, Hours, Risk, Tiers and Raising Your Prices

You have a handful of clients paying you a monthly fee to “look after” their websites, and you suspect you are losing money on some of them. Or you are about to launch a care plan and have no idea what to charge. Maybe you copied a number from a forum thread, and now one WooCommerce client takes more of your time than the other ten combined.

This guide is for freelancers and small agencies who maintain WordPress sites for clients. It does not give you a market rate, because there is no honest single number: rates swing widely by country, niche, experience and what is included, and any figure we printed would be out of date or wrong for you. Instead it shows you how to build your price from your own costs, your own hours and the risk each site carries, then package it into tiers clients understand and raise it without drama. Every number in the worked example is a clearly labeled example, not a recommendation.

What you are actually selling

Clients do not buy “plugin updates”. They buy the confidence that the site will be there tomorrow, that someone competent notices when it is not, and that a known person will fix it quickly. Your care plan is a promise with three parts:

• Routine work you do on a schedule: backups checked, updates applied safely, monitoring reviewed, a short report.
• Availability: a stated response time when something breaks, and a channel the client can use.
• Risk you absorb: the update that breaks the checkout, the expired license, the plugin vulnerability on a Friday evening.

Most underpriced plans only cost out the first part. The second and third are where the hours disappear, so they have to be in the price.

Step 1: Add up what each site costs you before you touch it

List every recurring cost the plan creates. Use your real invoices, not guesses.

Cost	Examples	How to allocate it
Tools shared across all sites	Management dashboard, uptime and SSL monitoring, off-site backup storage, password manager, vulnerability alerts, a staging service	Monthly total divided by the number of sites on plans
Licenses you pay per site	Premium plugins, a builder or theme license, a security plugin, an SMTP or transactional email service	Charged to that site directly
Hosting, if you resell it	Your share of a server or a per-site hosting plan	Per site; keep it visible rather than buried
Business overhead	Accounting, insurance, equipment, training, your own website	Belongs in your hourly rate (Step 3), not here

License math that quietly loses money

Shared tools are where care plans leak. Before you add a tool to the monthly total, work out its true monthly cost:

• Count licenses, not sites. If a license covers a fixed number of sites, the number you need is your site count divided by the sites per license, rounded up. You cannot buy part of a license. Example numbers only: a plan that covers 15 sites needs two licenses for 20 sites, not 1.33.
• Turn every billing cycle into a monthly figure. Divide annual prices by 12. For a one-off “lifetime” purchase, spread the cost over a period you choose, and keep it short, because the vendor may stop updating the product long before your spreadsheet says it is paid off.
• Include the tools you use for every client: monitoring, reporting, the password manager, the management dashboard, the backup storage. They are easy to forget because they feel like “the business”, not “the plan”.
• Add the cost of getting paid. Card and payment processor fees, and any sales tax or VAT you must charge or cannot reclaim, come out of every invoice.

Watch for license costs that are quietly per site. A plugin you bought on an “unlimited sites” plan costs nothing extra per site today, but it renews every year and the vendor can change the terms. Write down the renewal date for each in a renewals register so a price rise does not surprise you mid-contract.

Step 2: Measure your hours honestly

This is where most care plans go wrong. People count the ten minutes it takes to click “update all” and forget the rest. Track every minute you spend on each maintained site for two or three months, in a time tracker or a simple spreadsheet, and include:

• Taking and checking a backup before updates, and the quarterly test restore.
• Reading changelogs for builders, WooCommerce, payment gateways and major versions.
• Updates on staging, checking key pages and forms afterward, and pushing to live.
• Fixing what an update broke, including the time spent finding out it broke.
• Reviewing uptime alerts, security scans and Search Console messages.
• Writing the monthly report.
• Client emails and small requests that “only take a minute”.
• Admin: invoicing, chasing renewals, updating your records.

Our monthly maintenance checklist and the safe update routine list the real steps, which makes a useful timing sheet. After a few months you will see a pattern: brochure sites cluster around one figure, shops and membership sites around a much higher one, and one or two sites are outliers you need to price separately.

If you have no history yet, estimate high, put a review clause in the agreement (for example, after the first three months), and measure.

Step 3: Work out the hourly rate your business needs

Your rate is not what a competitor charges. It is what you need to earn per billable hour to cover your living, your overhead and your quiet months. A simple way to calculate it:

1. Decide the income you need from the business for a year, before tax.
2. Add your annual business costs (from the overhead row above).
3. Estimate your billable hours per year honestly. Take your working weeks after vacation and sick days, multiply by the hours you work, then remove the time spent selling, learning, doing admin and waiting for clients. For many freelancers the billable share is well below the hours they are at their desk.
4. Divide the total from steps 1 and 2 by the billable hours from step 3.

Example numbers only: suppose you need 60,000 a year in income, your business costs are 12,000 a year, and you expect 1,000 billable hours. (60,000 + 12,000) / 1,000 = 72 per hour. Round to a figure you are comfortable saying out loud, say 75. Your figures, currency and hours will differ; the method is the point.

Maintenance work interrupts other work, needs a fast response and carries responsibility, so do not discount it below your project rate. If anything, the availability you promise is worth more than ordinary project hours.

Step 4: Price the risk, site by site

Two sites with the same monthly routine can carry very different risk. Score each site before you quote it:

Risk factor	Why it costs you more
WooCommerce, bookings or memberships	Updates touch money and personal data, need more testing and must not lose orders during a push. See pushing staging to live without losing orders.
Many plugins, or several premium ones	More updates, more conflicts, more licenses to track.
An old or abandoned builder or theme	Updates break layouts, and an exit may be needed eventually. See WPBakery and Avada problems on inherited sites.
Inherited site you did not build	Unknown code, unknown licenses and possibly unknown access. Do the inherited site takeover first, as paid onboarding.
Old PHP version, or hosting you do not control	Upgrades and incidents take longer when you work through someone else.
Client editors who install things	More break and fix. Either restrict roles or price it in.
High traffic or business critical	A faster response time and more care on every change.

You can handle risk in two ways, and most people combine them. Either add hours to the site’s monthly estimate (a “reserve” for break and fix), or move higher risk sites into a higher tier. Do not average the risk across every client: that makes your simple sites overpriced and your complex ones a loss.

Step 5: Put the numbers together

The formula is short:

• Cost per site per month = (your hours per site x your hourly rate) + (shared tool costs / number of sites) + per site licenses + hosting you pay for.
• Price per site = cost / (1 minus the margin you want, as a decimal).

Margin and markup are not the same thing. A 30 percent margin means 30 percent of the price is profit, which needs a larger uplift than adding 30 percent to cost. Dividing by (1 minus margin) gives you a true margin.

Worked example (example numbers only)

Input	Example value
Sites on the plan	20
Your hours per site each month, measured	1.5
Your hourly rate, from Step 3	75
Shared tools, total per month	300
Hosting you pay per site	0 (the client pays the host directly)
Margin you want	30 percent

Time: 1.5 x 75 = 112.50. Tools: 300 / 20 = 15. Cost per site: 127.50 a month. Price: 127.50 / 0.70 = about 182 a month per site. Twenty sites would bring in about 3,640 a month, of which about 1,090 is margin on top of being paid for your time.

Price for the client count you are aiming at, and know your break-even

Shared costs behave differently from your time. Divided across 20 sites, a 300 a month tool stack (example numbers) costs 15 per site. Divided across your first 4 clients, the same stack costs 75 per site. Price your plan for the number of clients you are designing it for, but also work out how many clients you need before the shared costs are covered. Showing yourself both figures explains why the first few care plans feel unprofitable, and stops you panicking and cutting the price. Allow, too, for some clients leaving each year: a plan that only works if nobody ever cancels is underpriced.

You do not need to do this by hand. The care plan pricing calculator in our Design Field Kit uses exactly this formula: enter the number of sites, your hours per site, your rate, your tool costs, any hosting you pay and the margin you want. It runs in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere. Run it once per tier, with the hours you measured for sites of that type.

Then sense check the answer. If the price feels impossible for your clients, the fix is rarely a smaller margin. It is fewer hours (better tools, a standard stack, fewer plugins), fewer inclusions, or a different kind of client.

Do the sums in seconds: the free care plan cost and profit calculator works through steps 1 to 5 for you, counts licenses properly and shows the number of clients you need to break even.

Step 6: Build tiers around what is included

Three tiers is common because it is easy to compare. Separate them by scope and response, not just by hours, so clients pick the level of care their business needs.

What changes between tiers	Lower tier	Middle tier	Higher tier
Typical site	Brochure site, few plugins	Business site with forms, bookings or a blog	Shop, membership or business critical site
Updates	Monthly, tested on staging	Every two weeks, tested on staging	Weekly or as released, tested, with security patches same day where possible
Backups	Daily, off-site, checked	Daily, off-site, test restore each quarter	More frequent, database backups around order activity, regular test restores
Monitoring	Uptime and SSL	Plus forms and email delivery checks	Plus checkout tests and vulnerability alerts reviewed promptly
Response to “site down”	Next business day	Same business day	Within a stated number of hours
Small changes included	None, or a small allowance	A set number of minutes or hours	A larger allowance
Report	Short monthly summary	Monthly summary with changes and issues	Monthly report plus a quarterly review call

Two packaging ideas make tiers easier to run. First, instead of selling open-ended support hours, sell a number of small tasks per month, each with a stated maximum length (for example, “up to 30 minutes each”). Clients understand it, you can plan for it, and anything bigger becomes a quoted job. Say whether unused tasks roll over. Second, keep optional extras as add-ons with their own price and billing cycle, and note any prerequisite: ongoing management of a business listing, for instance, only makes sense after a one-off setup.

Only promise a response time you can actually staff, including when you are on vacation. If you work alone, a “within 2 hours, 24/7” promise is a promise to never switch your phone off. Write the response as a response, not a fix: “we start work within X hours”, never “fixed within X hours”.

What to include and what to exclude

Write both lists into the agreement. The exclusions protect you as much as the inclusions sell the plan.

Usually included	Usually excluded or billed separately
Core, plugin and theme updates, tested	Redesigns, new pages, new features
Backups and restores from those backups	Content entry beyond the allowance
Uptime, SSL and security monitoring	Problems caused by the client installing or editing things
Fixing problems your updates caused	Third party outages (host, registrar, payment gateway)
A stated amount of small changes	Major version migrations, builder replacements, PHP upgrades beyond routine
A monthly report	Hack cleanup beyond a stated limit, or included only in higher tiers

Decide your position on hack cleanup deliberately. A cleanup can take many hours. Some designers include it in every tier because their update routine makes infection unlikely; others include it only in the top tier or cap it. Either is fine if it is written down. Our maintenance agreement outline lists the sections a solid agreement covers, from scope and service levels to termination and handover.

Also decide what happens to unused hours. Rolling them over indefinitely builds a debt of work you owe. Many plans let them expire monthly or roll over for a limited time.

Raising your prices

Your costs rise every year, your skills improve and your first prices were probably too low. Plan a review once a year.

1. Re-run the numbers. Update your tool costs, re-measure hours per site, and recalculate. Sometimes the answer is a rise for one tier only, or for specific sites whose risk changed (a brochure site that became a shop).
2. Check your agreement. Give the notice it requires for price changes. If it says nothing, give generous notice, such as a full billing cycle or two, and fix the clause next time.
3. Write a short, plain email. Say what the new price is, when it starts, and one or two sentences on why (costs, added services). Do not apologize at length.
4. Offer a choice where it makes sense. A client who cannot afford the new price may fit a lower tier with fewer inclusions.
5. Accept that a few clients may leave. If the numbers say a client costs you money, losing them improves your business. Help them leave cleanly with the client offboarding template.

A simple email you can adapt: “Hi [name], from [date] the [tier] care plan for [site] will be [new price] per month. Over the past year [tool and license costs went up / we added uptime checks for your forms], and this keeps the plan sustainable. Nothing changes in what you receive. If you would like to talk about a different level of cover, reply and we will set up a time.”

Common pricing mistakes

• “Unlimited support”. It invites unlimited requests. Give an allowance and a rate for extra work instead.
• Copying a competitor’s price. You do not know their costs, hours, clients or whether they are making money.
• Pricing by plugin count alone. Ten simple plugins can be easier than one payment gateway.
• Taking over a site without an audit. Charge for onboarding: the first month on an inherited site is often several times the normal effort.
• Burying hosting in the plan. Clients compare your plan to cheap hosting. Show hosting and care as separate lines, or explain clearly what the care adds.
• Never saying no. Small free favors become expectations. Log them as no charge lines so the client sees the value, and use the scope creep script when a favor becomes a project.

If none of that worked

If the numbers still do not add up, look at the hours first. A standard plugin stack, one backup system, one monitoring service and a written routine cut more time than any price rise. The guide to managing many client sites safely covers inventories, bulk updates and monitoring at scale. If one client takes far more time than the rest, move them to a higher tier or to hourly billing for anything outside the routine. And if a client stops paying altogether, follow the calm, step by step approach in what to do when a client will not pay.

Related reading: proposal and scope of work outline, site down client emails and incident log and post-incident report.