What should I charge for website maintenance?
The short answer
Price the outcome, not the hours — a monthly fee covering a defined scope, tiered so clients pick their level. Anchor it to what the client would lose if the site broke, not to how long updates take you. And write down what is excluded, because almost every maintenance agreement that goes wrong does so over an unstated boundary rather than a number.
On this page
Why hourly pricing fails here
Maintenance is mostly the absence of problems. If you price by the hour, a good month — nothing broke, no one needed anything — bills the least, which means you earn least exactly when you are doing your job best.
It also puts a meter on every client email, which trains them not to send one. Then the thing they did not mention becomes the thing that breaks.
Price the outcome instead: the site stays up, stays current, stays secure, and someone is watching.
What to anchor the number to
Not your time. Anchor to what the client loses if the site is wrong or down.
For a restaurant, a broken booking page on a Friday is a night's covers. For a clinic, wrong opening hours is a wasted trip and a bad review. For a trades business, a contact form that silently stops sending is every lead for a fortnight.
That framing changes the conversation from "why does this cost so much when nothing happened" to "this is insurance against something specific". And it is honest — it is exactly what you are selling.
A structure that works
Three tiers, each including the one below:
Essentials. Hosting, SSL, backups, uptime monitoring, security updates. The floor. Cheap enough that saying no feels reckless.
Maintained. Adds a monthly check, a defined amount of content change, and a short report of what happened. This is where most small businesses land.
Managed. Adds priority response, larger content work, and a quarterly conversation about what the site should do next. For clients whose site actually earns.
Tiers work better than one price because the client is choosing their level rather than negotiating yours.
The three exclusions to write down
Most maintenance relationships sour over scope, not price. These three prevent the majority of it:
New features versus fixes. A broken form is a fix. A new booking system is a project. State the line and give an example of each.
Third-party breakage. When someone else's service changes and breaks something, is investigating included? Usually yes for a bounded time, then quoted. Say so.
Emergency response. What counts as an emergency, and what happens at 9pm on a Saturday. Either it is covered and priced accordingly, or it is not covered and everyone knows.
What clients ask that you should have an answer for
"What am I actually paying for in a month where nothing happens?" The honest answer is monitoring, updates and the fact that nothing happened partly because of them. Have a report that shows it, or this question will keep coming back.
"Can I cancel?" Yes, monthly, and say so early. A short notice period sells more plans than a long one protects.
"What happens to my site if we stop?" They keep it. Say that plainly. Anything else makes the whole arrangement feel like a hostage situation, and word gets around.
The change that raises the rate
If the client can make small content changes themselves, your maintenance plan stops being about tiny edits and becomes about the things that need expertise. That justifies a higher rate rather than a lower one — and it removes the work you least wanted to be doing.
The clients who value you most are rarely the ones sending the most small requests. They are the ones whose sites are working, quietly, because someone competent is looking after them.
The other structure, where the platform runs it
Everything above assumes you are the one running the infrastructure — which is what makes a maintenance plan defensible and also what makes it a commitment. Uptime is now partly your problem, and so is the Saturday.
The alternative is that the client is on a platform that runs itself, you are paid for the judgement rather than the plumbing, and you take a share of the subscription rather than billing a retainer for it. That is what Helm Partners is: you introduce the client, Helm builds or attaches the site and runs it, the client gets a branded dashboard for the routine changes, and you are paid a one-off share of the build plus a share of the subscription for a set period. The terms sit in your own agreement rather than a published rate card.
It is not strictly better than a retainer — it pays differently and it removes a lever, because you no longer set the price of the hosting. It is better if the maintenance plan you are contemplating is mostly a way to stop doing small changes for free, since the dashboard removes those changes rather than repricing them.