Start your first digest

Notes

How to price a website care plan so the invoice is not the only proof

20 October 2026

A care retainer dies in a specific way. The work happened. The invoice went out. The client still cannot say what the invoice was for, so the next conversation is about the price, not about the site. Pricing does not fix that by itself. A price attached to a list the client can repeat, and a page they can open, is a different offer from an hourly leftover called “maintenance.”

This note is the offer. How to write the month so the work is visible is the other half, and it already lives on making maintenance work visible. The blank letter is the report template. If the site is WordPress and you want the care-plan wording, use care-plan reporting. I am not going to repeat those pages. I am going to talk about the package, the number, and the email that carries both.

Name the job before you name the price

“Website maintenance” is a junk drawer. Inside it I usually find four different jobs, and clients get angry when they thought they bought one of them and received another.

If your plan includes all four and the proposal says “maintenance,” you will spend the year arguing about the third one. A new page is not a small change. A new integration is not a small change. “Can you just” is how the third job eats the month. The package exists to make that argument short.

I sell the reservation of attention, not a pile of hours the client has to invent work to fill. The site is quiet some months. Those months are still the product, because the watching and the letter happened, and because I did not give the hour to someone else. If you price only the hours you can point at, the quiet months look like theft. Say that in the proposal, in one sentence, or you will be discounting every January.

Three packages, as a worksheet

I use three names. They are labels for scope, not a claim that the industry has settled on them. Watch, Care, and Studio. You can rename them. Do not rename them in the middle of a contract.

Three care packages in columns: Watch, Care, and Studio. Rows show the monthly letter, outside checks, who applies updates, and whether a change budget is included.
The client should be able to point at a column. If they cannot, the package is still a junk drawer.

Watch is for the site you do not edit. Webflow and Squarespace clients often live here, because they change the words themselves and they hired you to notice when the form dies or the domain lapses. Watch includes the outside checks, the letter, and a defined way to reach you when something is actually down. It does not include content edits. A content edit on a Watch plan is a quoted task or a reason to move them to Care. Doing it “just this once” is how Watch becomes unpaid Care.

Care is the usual retainer. Outside checks, the letter, the platform updates you are allowed to perform, and a small change budget. I will come back to how the budget is counted. Care is what I mean when a client says “keep the site healthy and do the little things.”

Studio is Care plus a standing block for larger edits, and a faster answer during the week. It is not unlimited. Unlimited is a lie you tell when you are afraid to name a number. The block is a number of slices, written down. When the block is gone, the next request is a project with its own price, scheduled when you have the week, not squeezed into the retainer.

Write the boundary in the client’s words, not in yours. “Up to four small changes a month, each one a single screen you can point at” beats “content updates as needed.” “Plugin and theme updates on the second Tuesday, checked on the public site afterwards” beats “WordPress maintenance.” The second Tuesday is a choice. The point is that they could repeat it to someone else.

The arithmetic, with round numbers on purpose

I do not have a survey of what agencies charge, and I am not going to invent one. The number below is a worksheet so you can see the operations. Replace the hourly figure with yours. The figure I used is 100 dollars, because the multiplication is obvious. It is not a rate card, it is not an invoice I sent, and it is not a client.

A price worksheet in four blocks: expected hours, times an internal hourly number, plus a reserve because the time is held, plus tooling you pay yourself. The last block is a price you can say out loud.
The reserve is there because the hour is held even when they send nothing. It is a choice, not a published standard.

The formula I use on paper:

price = expected hours x internal hourly number x reserve + tooling

Watch:  0.5 hour x 100 x 1.2 + tooling = 60 + tooling
Care:   1.5 hour x 100 x 1.3 + tooling = 195 + tooling
Studio: 4 hours x 100 x 1.25 + tooling = 500 + tooling

Expected hours are the hours you think the month will actually take, including the letter and the pass, not the hours you hope. If Care really takes three hours because their checkout is fragile, the worksheet is lying and the price will too. Measure two months, then change the expected hours. Do not silently work the extra hour and resent the invoice.

The reserve is the part people skip. On Watch I used 1.2, because the scope is narrow and a quiet month is the normal month. On Care I used 1.3, because a change request can land on the week you are already full. On Studio I used 1.25, slightly lower, because a four-hour block is more likely to be used, so you are less often holding empty time. These multipliers are my choices for the worksheet. If your pipeline is bursty, raise them. If you already have a bench of freelancers you can hand a slice to, you might lower them. Write the reason next to the number so future-you does not treat 1.3 as scripture.

Tooling is what you pay, allocated to the site. It is not the client’s price. RetainerProof is 9, 29, or 79 dollars a month depending on the plan, for up to 5, 25, or 100 sites. If one Studio account holds twenty client sites, the tool is a few dollars per site, not a line you copy onto their invoice as if the tool were the service. Hosting, a premium form tool, a transactional email bill: if you pay it on their behalf, it is either a separate line at cost or it is inside the retainer and you said so. Do not hide a 40-dollar email bill inside a 60-dollar Watch plan and then wonder why the plan feels tight.

Round to a number you can say out loud. 195 dollars becomes 200. 60 plus a 15-dollar hosting line becomes 75 or stays split. I would rather say “200 a month for Care, hosting billed at cost” than “195 plus a variable tooling allocation.” The worksheet is for you. The sentence is for them.

What the one-pager says

The proposal is one page. If it needs a deck, the scope is a project, not a retainer. I use this skeleton. The brackets are the only parts that change.

[Client]
[Site URL]
Plan: Care
Price: 200 dollars a month, hosting billed at cost (about [n] a month, their registrar)
Starts: [date]. Billed monthly. Cancel with 30 days notice.

Included every month
- Outside checks on the homepage and [the money path]
- Certificate date and domain date, with a warning while there is still time to act
- [WordPress updates on the second Tuesday / no platform updates, they edit in Webflow]
- Up to 60 minutes of small changes, counted in 15-minute slices
- A letter: what changed, and whether the site was up. Same link each month.

Not included
- New pages, new features, new integrations
- Copywriting beyond swapping text they provided
- Emergencies caused by a plugin, app, or embed they installed without asking
- Design work

A small change is one screen they can point at, in systems I already have a login for.
Anything else is a project with its own price before I start.

Read that last paragraph to them, out loud, before they sign. The people who flinch are the people who were about to use the retainer as a mini agency. Better now than in month three.

How a request gets sorted

Every incoming request lands in one of three lanes. I decide the lane before I do the work, and I say the lane in the reply. “This is in the plan.” “This uses two slices of the change budget, 30 minutes, you have 30 left.” “This is a project. I can quote it on Thursday.”

Three lanes for a client request: included in the plan, drawn from the change budget, or quoted as a project. A new page and a new feature are in the project lane.
Say the lane in the reply. A request that starts without a lane becomes a free project.

Included, and not counted against the budget: the checks, the letter, the updates the plan named, and fixing something I broke. If I shipped a bad deploy, the repair is mine. If their new embed took the checkout down, that is either the change budget or a project, depending on size, and I say which before I touch it.

The change budget is where small edits live. I count in 15-minute slices because five-minute accounting is fiction. Changing a phone number in the footer is one slice, even if the typing takes four minutes, because the login, the publish, and the line in the letter are part of the slice. If I have to log into a second system, it is two slices. If they have not provided the new text and I have to write it, it is not a slice yet. I send one question and I wait. Writing their slogan inside the retainer is how copywriting sneaks in.

Unused slices expire at the end of the month. I do not roll them. The month was the reservation. If unused time rolls forward, December becomes a twelve-hour project you cannot staff, and the client thinks they are owed a rebuild because they were quiet in the summer. I have watched that happen to other people’s retainers, and I am not interested in running the experiment myself. If they want a larger piece of work, it is a project with a date. The quiet month still gets the letter, so the invoice has an exhibit.

A project has a price and a start date before any of it is done. “I’ll just begin and we’ll see” is how projects get billed as slices until the budget is gone and the work is half finished. Stop at the boundary. The half-finished page is a worse client experience than a clear no.

The email that carries the price

I do not attach a deck. I send a short note, the one-pager, and a link they can click. The link is the object the price buys. If you have nothing to show yet, use a sample digest and say it is a sample, with stand-in numbers, not their site. Do not imply the sample is a result you measured for them.

Subject: Care plan for [site]

The plan is Care, 200 dollars a month. Hosting stays in your name and I bill it at cost.

Each month you get the checks, up to an hour of small edits, and this kind of page:
[sample or their first real report]

The top is what I changed. Under that is whether the site was up, and when the certificate and the domain expire. Same link next month.

New pages and new features are quoted separately. Unused edit time does not roll over.

If that matches what you want, I’ll send the agreement dated [start].

Three short blocks. The price, the object, the boundary. If I have to explain a dashboard in that email, I have already lost the plot. The commercial overview of what a report is for, if you need the longer version for yourself, is website maintenance reporting for agencies. The client does not need that page. They need the paragraph above.

Renewal is not a new pitch

Thirty days before the term renews, I send the latest letter and three lines. What the plan was. That the next term is the same price unless the scope changed. The date it renews. I do not reopen the worksheet in that email. If the scope grew, the conversation happened when the scope grew, not as a surprise on the renewal date.

A renewal month on one line: the usual report goes out, a short note thirty days before renewal points at that report, and the scope is not rewritten in the same email.
The report is the exhibit. The renewal note points at it. It does not re-sell the retainer from zero.

If they ask “what have you done all year,” the letters are the answer. That is the whole point of writing them in their language, which is the retainer value note. If the letters are thin, the renewal will be a negotiation, and you will discount. A discount at renewal, given because the record is thin, teaches them that pushing works. Fix the letter next month. Do not buy the renewal with a cut you will resent.

Raising the price is allowed when the worksheet changed: more expected hours, a real increase in your hourly number, a new system you now have to watch. Say the reason in one line. “Checkout is now part of the pass, so Care moves from 200 to 260 on the next term.” Offer them Watch if they want the old price and a smaller scope. Taking scope away is cleaner than pretending the old scope still fits the old number.

Discounts

I do not discount the scope. If they cannot pay the Care number, they get Watch, or they get Care without the change budget, and the one-pager is rewritten so the missing line is obvious. A quiet 10 percent off, with the same promises, is how you end up doing Care at Watch’s price.

Annual prepay is a cash decision, not a sale. If you offer it, take it off the cash and leave the scope alone. Two months off a twelve-month prepay is a common shape. I am not citing a study. I am saying: if you do it, write “pay for 10 months, cover 12, same scope” and mean the same scope. Do not prepay your own hosting costs out of pocket for a client who might cancel in month four unless the agreement says the prepay is non-refundable or you can stand the loss. Cash you already spent on their domain is a bad surprise.

Friends-and-family pricing needs an end date in the agreement. “400 instead of 200 until June, then the worksheet price.” Open-ended mates’ rates become the real price, and you cannot raise them without a fight. I would rather decline the work than carry a secret rate for two years.

What I put in the agreement, and what I leave out

The website maintenance contract template holds the plan name, the price, the billing day, how to cancel, the included list, the not-included list, who owns the accounts (theirs, with you as a user, whenever the platform allows it), and what happens to the letter if they cancel (they keep the pages already sent, you stop on the end date).

Out: a service-level promise you copied from a host. Do not promise 99.9 percent uptime unless you control the host and you mean it. A brochure site on a platform you do not operate cannot honestly carry a telecom-style uptime clause. Promise what you control: you will check, you will tell them, you will do the included work, you will answer within the window named in the website maintenance SLA. Studio’s “faster answer” needs a window too. “Same business day” is a window. “Priority” is not.

Also out: your internal hourly number. They bought the package. The worksheet stays in your notebook. Quoting the hourly number in the proposal invites them to audit the slices against a timesheet. The slices are how you count the budget, and you can tell them the slice size. You do not owe them a timesheet of the watching.

A checklist before you send it

If the last line fails, the price is wrong or the book is full. Selling Care into a full book is how the letter gets skipped, and then the pricing conversation comes back as “what am I paying for.” The package only works if the month you sold is a month you can run. The pass itself, the actual checks, is the next note. The stack those checks sit on, if you host the app yourself, is the small-agency hosting stack.

Sources and the numbers I am willing to stand behind

The only prices in this note that are a published offer are the RetainerProof plans: 9, 29, and 79 dollars a month, on the pricing section. The 100-dollar hour and the 1.2, 1.3, and 1.25 reserves are worksheet choices so the arithmetic is visible. They are not a market rate and not a client invoice. I am not quoting a survey because I do not have one I am willing to treat as a fact.