WordPress maintenance is one of those services every Idaho business needs and almost nobody enjoys paying for, right up until the day they do not have it. A care plan is the difference between a site going down at 2am and costing you three days of leads, and the same problem being caught overnight and fixed before you open, so you never notice. Here is what my care plan actually covers, what it costs, and what it deliberately does not cover.
One plan, one price
Care is a single plan at $149.99 a month, month to month. There are no tiers, no metered hours, and nothing to compare on a chart before you can work out what you are buying. I priced it that way on purpose: tiers exist mostly so a client can be moved up one, and metered hours turn every small request into a negotiation about whether it is worth spending your allowance on.
If you want to commit, the monthly rate comes down: 5% at six months, 10% at twelve, 20% at twenty-four, 30% at thirty-six. Nonprofits, veterans, and active-duty military get 20% off. Discounts do not stack, so whichever single one is larger is the one that applies.
You can cancel any time, effective at the end of the month you have already paid for. If you leave a committed term early you do not pay out the rest of it. The months you actually used get re-rated to the longest term you completed, capped so you never pay more than the month-to-month rate for that time.
What the plan covers
- WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates, taken backup-first so anything that goes wrong is reversible in minutes, and run through staging first where the update warrants it.
- Security scanning, firewall, and monitoring.
- Uptime monitoring and alerts.
- Off-site backups on hosting you hold. If your site is on my hosting instead, backups come with the hosting and the care plan does not charge you for them. Backups belong to whoever holds the hosting account, so you never pay for them twice.
- Performance checks and a monthly report in plain English.
- Small edits to what is already on your site: text, images, hours, prices, swapping content out. If it is about keeping the current site accurate and working, it is in.
- A person, not a ticket queue. Email, text, or call. Same business day for care clients, and a site that is down comes first.
What the plan does not cover, and what those cost instead
New pages, new features, and redesigns are not metered into the plan, because a plan that includes “some” new work is a plan that argues with you about how much. Those are either a fixed-fee quote or they come out of prepaid development hours.
Prepaid hours run in 5-hour packs, from $100 an hour down to $75 an hour at 30 hours. They do not expire. There is no monthly reset and no use-it-or-lose-it clock, so a balance you bought in March is still sitting there in November.
Work outside business hours (evenings, weekends, or federal holidays) is billed at $150 an hour with a one-hour minimum, in 30-minute increments after that.
Care is not hosting, and hosting is not care
These get mixed up constantly, so plainly: hosting keeps your site online. Care keeps it looked after. They are separate products at separate prices and you can have either, both, or neither.
Hosting covers the server, your storage and visit allowance, backups, and monitoring, and runs $24.99 or $49.99 a month depending on how many sites you need. Care covers updates, security, fixes, and edits to your existing site, at $149.99 a month. If I host your site, backups come with the hosting. If the hosting account is yours, backups are a care-plan item, because then I am reaching into an account I do not control to make sure the copies exist and actually restore.
There is more detail on both in Hosting, Handled.
If I did not build your site
You can still go on the plan. Inherited sites start with a one-time onboarding audit: I review the site, the hosting, and the code, send you a written report, and bring it to a clean baseline first. That baseline work gets quoted after the audit, once I know what I am actually working with. From there you are on the same plan as everyone else, with one honest caveat. Since I did not write the original code, support starts from getting familiar with it, and pre-existing problems that surface can be quoted as separate remediation rather than absorbed silently.
Why the cost of skipping it is invisible until it is not
The cost of not having care does not show up on a bill. Plugin bloat, abandoned dependencies, untracked vulnerabilities, and slow performance decay all accumulate quietly. A site that launched fast three years ago with nobody looking after it is, today, slower, less secure, and missing everything that has shipped in WordPress core since.
I am not going to put a number on what a day of downtime costs you, because I do not know your business and anyone who quotes you a figure for that is making it up. What I can tell you is that the fix is almost always cheaper before it breaks than after.
Free consultation
Book a 30-minute call and I will go through your current site: what is out of date, what is at risk, what is already broken. No pressure to sign up at the end of it. Or read the full care plan overview.
Thinking About a Project?
Free quote, scope and price locked up front, fully owned at launch.