What breaks after launch, and how to sell a care plan that covers it
Price a care plan on what you will actually do each month, not on the hope that nothing happens. Three tiers work for most agencies: a basic plan covering updates, backups, uptime and a short monthly edit allowance; a middle plan adding content changes and performance checks; and a top plan that includes development hours and a named response time. The sentence that protects the margin is the one that defines an edit — without it, every plan becomes unlimited.
Most agencies know they should sell maintenance. Fewer do it, and the reason is rarely the price. It is that nobody wants to describe the service, because describing it means admitting that websites break.
They do break. Here is what actually goes wrong in year one, and how to build a plan around it that is worth buying and worth selling.
What actually breaks, in rough order of frequency
The contact form stops arriving. Overwhelmingly the most common failure, and the most damaging, because nothing looks wrong. The site is up, the form submits, the message goes nowhere. A plugin updated, a mail provider tightened its rules, a forwarding address was closed when someone left.
An update breaks the layout. A plugin or theme update shifts something on one template. Nobody notices for three weeks, because nobody visits that template except customers.
A licence lapses. A premium plugin renews annually on a card that has since expired. It keeps working, stops receiving updates, and eventually stops working.
The SSL certificate or domain expires. Automated almost everywhere now, which is exactly why nobody is watching the one place it is not.
A piece of content goes stale in a way that costs money. Last year’s prices, a closed location, holiday hours from a previous season. Not a technical failure, and more expensive than most of them.
Something gets slower. A client uploads twelve photographs straight from a phone and the page they sit on triples in weight.
Rarely, but it happens: the site is compromised. Almost always an unpatched known vulnerability on an old install, not anything exotic.
Notice how many are not really technical. Half the value of a care plan is that someone is looking at the site at all.
Three tiers that map to that list
Build the tiers around what you will actually do, each month, whether or not anything goes wrong.
Basic — keeping it alive. Updates applied and checked, offsite backups with a tested restore, uptime monitoring, SSL and domain watch, and a short allowance for text and image edits. One to two hours a month once the routine exists.
Middle — keeping it current. Everything above, plus content changes within an agreed allowance, a quarterly performance and broken-link check, a form test every month, and a short written report. Three to five hours.
Top — treating it as a product. Everything above, plus a block of development hours that may be used for improvements, a named response time, and a planning call each quarter. Eight hours or more, and this is the tier that turns a client into a retainer.
Price each from your own hours and rate, add margin for the month something breaks, and round up. Do not price from what another agency charges, because you cannot see their scope.
The sentence that decides whether this is profitable
Every care plan that loses money loses it the same way: the word edits is never defined.
Write the boundary explicitly, in the client’s language:
The plan covers changes to existing pages: text, images, prices, opening hours, and swapping a photograph. New pages, new templates, new integrations and redesigns are quoted separately.
Then add the allowance in a unit the client can count. Hours are abstract and invite argument about how long something should have taken. Requests are concrete: four requests a month, batched and handled within two business days, is understood immediately.
One more line, which prevents the most common dispute:
Unused allowance does not carry over.
Without it, a client arrives in month nine with twenty-seven stored requests and a reasonable expectation that you will do them all this week.
How to introduce it without it sounding like an upsell
Timing does most of the work.
At proposal. One line, listed as a normal part of the project: build, launch, then care from month one. Nobody argues with something that was always there.
At launch. This is the moment. The project went well, trust is at its peak, and the client is briefly aware of how much there is to go wrong. Walk them through the handover, show them the backup running and the monitoring working, and let the plan be the obvious continuation.
Never three months later, cold, as a new proposal. At that point you are asking them to start paying for something they believed was included, and the conversation is about their assumption rather than your service.
For clients who refuse, offer one thing instead: a paid annual check, once a year, a fixed fee. Many of them convert to a monthly plan the first time something breaks and they remember who to call.
What to send every month, even in a quiet month
The hardest months to keep a plan sold are the ones where nothing happened. A client paying for silence starts to wonder what they are paying for.
Send five lines:
- Updates applied, and anything that needed attention after
- Backups taken and the last restore test
- Uptime for the month
- Changes made at your request this month
- One thing we noticed, with a recommendation
That last line is the whole report. It is proof somebody looked, and it is where the next piece of work comes from — a page that is slow, a form that could be shorter, a product category nobody visits.
If you subcontract the build, decide who holds the plan
This is worth settling before the first project, not after.
Two arrangements work. In the first, you hold the client relationship and the plan, and your development partner is available to you at an agreed rate or within a monthly block of hours. In the second, your partner carries the technical side under your name, and you carry content and the client.
What does not work is the unspoken version, where nobody holds it and both of you assume the other is watching the site. That arrangement survives exactly until the first Saturday outage.
For agencies who would rather not carry the technical half at all, this is what a monthly block of capacity with a white label partner is for: a known number of hours each month, invoiced to you, with your name on everything the client sees.
The point of all this
A care plan is not really about plugin updates. It is about being the person the client calls, every month, for years — which is also the cheapest source of new work any agency has.
The agency that disappears after launch is a vendor. The one that sends five lines every month is the one that gets asked about next year’s project without having to pitch for it.
Common questions
What should a website care plan cost?
Work backwards from hours, not from what competitors charge. A basic plan is usually one to two hours a month once the routine is set up, a middle plan three to five, a top plan eight or more. Multiply by your rate, add a margin for the month something goes wrong, and round up. The number matters less than the scope: a cheap plan with clear limits is profitable, an expensive plan with unlimited edits is not.
How do I sell maintenance to a client who thinks the site is finished?
Do not sell maintenance. Sell the thing they would be upset to lose: the site staying up, the contact form still arriving, and someone answering when something looks wrong. Introduce it in the launch conversation, while the project is still the good thing you did together, and present it as the normal next step rather than a new proposal. Raised three months after launch, it reads as an attempt to charge for something they assumed was included.
What belongs in the basic plan and what should cost extra?
The basic plan covers keeping the site working: updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security patches, and a small allowance for text and image changes. Extra should be anything that creates something new — a new page, a new template, a new integration, a redesign of a section. The boundary is easiest to hold when it is written as a question: does this change what the site is, or keep it as it is?
What response time can a small agency actually promise?
Promise what you can meet on a bad week, not a good one. For most small teams that is one business day for normal requests and same business day for a site that is down, within stated working hours. Writing the working hours down is the important part, because an unqualified promise of four hours is read as four hours on a Sunday. Under-promise and beat it; the reputation gain is larger than the one from a brave number you miss once.
Does a static site still need a care plan?
It needs less, and the plan should say so honestly. There are no updates to apply and little to attack, so the technical half shrinks to monitoring, dependency checks at build time, and backups of the content. What remains is the half clients value anyway: content changes and someone to call. Charging the same amount for a quarter of the work is how a trusted relationship quietly turns into a resented one.
