Price from the inside out
Most maintenance plans are priced by looking sideways: what other studios charge, rounded to a number that sounds reasonable. The trouble with a sideways price is that it has no floor and no argument. When a client asks why the plan costs what it costs, the honest answer is "that is what plans cost", and when money is tight that answer loses.
A price that survives is built from the inside out: what the plan costs you to deliver, what it is worth to the client and what the gap between the two has to cover. This article walks through that arithmetic and the three decisions that follow from it. It does not give you a number, because your costs are not ours.
Start with your cost to deliver
Write down everything the plan makes you do for one site in one month, and how long each takes at the pace of someone competent and uninterrupted:
- Applying updates and checking the site afterwards
- Verifying that the backups ran and that one restores
- Reading the uptime and error logs
- Running the public-page checks and writing up the findings
- Fixing the small items that fall inside the plan
- Writing and sending the report
- Answering the one email a month the plan generates
Add the fixed costs that attach to each site: hosting if you provide it, the licences and tools you use per site and the share of your monitoring stack. Then add the thing studios forget: the cost of a bad month. Every so often a site has a problem that takes a day. If that happens to one site in twenty each month, a twentieth of a day belongs on every plan.
Multiply the hours by the rate you need to earn, not the rate you quote for project work. Add the fixed costs. That number is the floor. Any price below it is a plan that loses money quietly, and quietly is the dangerous kind.
Then measure what it is worth
A client does not buy hours. They buy the absence of three things: a site that is down, a site that is compromised and a site that is quietly losing customers because something broke and nobody noticed. The value of the plan is the cost of those three to the business, multiplied by how often they would happen without it.
You can estimate this with the client. What does a day of the site being down cost in enquiries or orders? What would a compromised site cost in cleanup and reputation? What has a broken contact form, undetected for a month, already cost them in the past? Clients who have lived through one of these can answer quickly, and the answer is usually much larger than any plan fee.
This is also the argument for a findings-led report. A report that each month shows what was found and fixed is a running tally of value delivered. It turns the renewal conversation from "what did I pay for" into "what would I have missed".
Set the price between the two
The price sits above your floor and below the client's value, and the three decisions are where in that range it sits, how it is tiered and what it excludes.
Where in the range
Closer to the floor buys volume and churn; closer to the value buys fewer, calmer clients. For a studio of three to fifteen people the calmer option is usually the right one, because the limiting resource is attention, not leads. A plan priced to need forty sites to be worthwhile is a plan that fails at thirty-nine.
How it is tiered
Tiers should map to real differences in cost or risk, not to a feature list designed to upsell. A sensible split is by what the site is to the business: a brochure site that changes twice a year, a lead-generation site where a broken form costs money within days and a shop or booking site where an hour down is lost revenue. Each has a different cost of a bad month and a different value of the plan, so each can carry a different price without anyone feeling manipulated.
What it excludes
The plan covers keeping the site healthy. It does not cover building new things. Write the boundary down in the plan, repeat it in the report and price the work outside it separately. A plan with a soft boundary becomes an unlimited retainer at a fixed price, which is the fastest way to turn a profitable plan into a loss.
Lower your cost without lowering the service
Once the floor is known, the lever is the hours. The routine part of the plan, updates and backups and monitoring, is already automated in most studios. The part that is still done by hand, when it is done at all, is the findings: looking at every public page, every month, for the structural, readability and conversion faults a client would notice if they knew what to look for.
That is the hour that gets dropped when the month is busy, and it is the hour that produces the report the client actually reads. Automating it is why our hosted website audit exists. It fetches the public pages of a client site on our servers, runs the checks and returns a white-label Website Audit Report under your studio's name, with every finding on a named page, with a reason and a fix. The free check covers up to five pages and runs once per domain every 30 days. On a monthly plan every client site gets the full report on every public page up to 100. Plans are priced by blocks of client sites: see pricing. Monthly plans can be reserved now and open once the report meets its quality bar.
The effect on the arithmetic is simple. The findings hour falls out of the floor, the report improves and the price stays where the value puts it.
Make the report carry the price
A plan that is priced well and reported badly still churns. The fee is justified once, at signing, and then has to be re-justified every month by a document the client opens. Findings first, fixed items second, routine work third, next steps last. If the report does that, the price rarely comes up again.
See what a website audit report finds on a real site. Get a free website audit: enter a URL and an email, and we check the public pages on our servers. We never log in and never touch your files.