kockpit.cc
Request access

Guide · for agencies

How to price a website care plan

Published 10 August 2026 · Kockpit

Most care plans are priced by copying a competitor, and most competitors priced theirs the same way, which is how an entire industry ends up charging 49 a month for unlimited anxiety. A care plan price should come from two numbers you can defend: what it costs you to serve the site, and what it costs the client when the site fails. This guide is the method for finding both, and for building tiers that survive contact with real clients.

Start with the cost floor

Add up what one site actually costs you in a month: the tooling seat, the backup storage, and above all the minutes of human attention. Updates applied and checked, the monthly report written, the occasional "quick question" answered. Be honest about the minutes, because they are the part everyone rounds down. If a site takes ninety minutes of real attention a month and your loaded rate is 80 an hour, the floor is 120 before tooling. Any plan priced under its floor is charity with an invoice attached.

The floor is also where automation pays. Every check that runs itself, every report that assembles itself, moves the floor down and widens the margin on every plan you sell. This is worth knowing before you decide something "only takes a few minutes". A few minutes, times forty sites, times twelve months, is three weeks of someone's year.

Then the value ceiling

Now price the other side: what does failure cost this client? A day of downtime for a dentist's brochure site costs some phone calls. The same day for a store doing 2,000 a day in orders costs 2,000, plus the ad spend that arrived on a dead page, plus a cleanup bill if the cause was a hack. A care plan is insurance against that number, and insurance is priced against the size of the loss, not the cost of the paperwork.

This is why a single care plan price for every client is always wrong in one direction or both. It overcharges the brochure site or it wildly undercharges the store, and usually it does the second, because the store owner is the one who would have paid more without blinking.

Build three tiers, by what the site does

Tier by the site's job for the business, not by a grid of features nobody reads:

Name the tiers whatever suits your brand, but keep the logic visible: each step up is buying speed and certainty, not a longer feature list. The middle tier is where you want most clients, so price the entry tier close enough that stepping up feels cheap, and the top tier high enough that the middle one feels sensible. That framing is doing the selling for you.

Write the exclusions before the inclusions

Every care plan that dies, dies of scope. The plan covers care: updates, backups, monitoring, small changes inside the allowance. It does not cover redesigns, new features, new integrations, content writing or campaign work, and the agreement says so in plain words. The allowance needs a number on it, and the number needs to be visible to both sides, because "a couple of small changes" is the phrase that eats agencies. Tracked hours turn the boundary from an argument into a dashboard.

Schedule the increase on day one

Put an annual review into the agreement before the first invoice, so the increase is a calendar event instead of a confrontation. Then let the evidence carry it: a year of monthly reports, the incidents caught before the client noticed, the hours honestly logged against the allowance. A care plan priced right and documented well renews at a higher price with a five-minute conversation, because what you are really renewing is the client's decision not to worry about the website. The record of a quiet year is the product. The WordPress maintenance guide covers the monthly routine that produces that record.

The tooling, briefly

The two numbers this method rests on, the minutes each site really takes and the hours each client really uses, only exist if something counts them. Kockpit counts both: it watches every site on the plan and keeps logged hours beside each retainer, which is the allowance boundary enforcing itself. The method works from a spreadsheet too. It just stops scaling around the point the care plans start genuinely paying.