Website maintenance costs anywhere between nothing and a few hundred dollars a month, and the honest number depends on what is doing the maintaining. On a website builder it hides inside the $16–$39-a-month subscription. On a self-hosted WordPress site it is a stack of renewals around $557 a year, plus someone's hands to run it. On a hand-coded static site it is optional: our care plans run $95/month, and a site that skips one keeps working.
"Maintenance" is the vaguest line on any website quote, which is exactly why it deserves real numbers. Below is what the word actually covers, what each route charges for it, and — the part most maintenance pages skip — when you can honestly pay nothing at all.
What "website maintenance" actually is
Strip the packaging and upkeep is five jobs, the same five on every stack:
- Hosting and SSL — the site stays served, with a valid certificate that renews on time.
- Backups — copies exist, recent enough that a bad edit is a restore rather than a rebuild.
- Monitoring — someone finds out the site is down from an alert, not from a customer.
- Updates — the software under the site is kept current before it becomes a hole.
- Content edits — the price that changed, the photo to swap, the paragraph to fix.
Every maintenance bill on the market is some bundle of those five. What changes between routes is how many of them exist as work at all — which is where the money goes, or doesn't.
On a builder, maintenance is the subscription
Wix and Squarespace fold hosting, SSL and platform updates into the plan — that is a genuine part of what the $16–$39 a month buys (US pricing, July 2026). There is no separate maintenance bill, and for many small sites that convenience is the whole argument. Two lines stay yours, though: content edits are your evenings, and anything beyond the template arrives as apps with monthly fees of their own — the arithmetic of those is in one-time pricing for a business website. And the bundle has one structural string attached: the same subscription that maintains the site is what keeps it online, so the day the payments stop, so does the site.
On WordPress, the stack renews every year
A self-hosted WordPress site splits maintenance into licences you renew and labour someone performs. The licences, priced at the vendors' own pages on 11 August 2026, for one plausible business-site stack:
| Line | What we priced | First year | Every year after |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managed hosting | WP Engine or Kinsta, entry plan | $350 | $350 |
| Premium theme | Kadence Essentials | $99 | $99 |
| Forms | Gravity Forms Basic | $44 | $59 |
| Booking | Amelia Starter | $49 | $49 |
| Total | $542 | $557 |
The labour is the part no table prices: running the updates, checking nothing broke, keeping the plugin list from growing. Managed hosts sell slices of that job back — the full breakdown, read off the vendors' pages line by line, is in WordPress vs a custom website. None of this is an argument against WordPress; it is an argument that on WordPress, maintenance is a real yearly workload with a real yearly invoice, and both belong in the budget.
On a hand-coded static site, there is very little left to maintain
This is the structural difference, not a sales line. A site that ships as plain HTML and CSS has no plugin stack to patch, no database to guard, no admin login to defend — the classic maintenance workload mostly is not reduced, it is absent. What remains is short: the domain renewal (the one mandatory yearly payment), hosting — our builds run on hosting that costs us nothing, which is part of why upkeep can sit inside a flat fee — occasional dependency updates at build time, and whatever content changes the business needs. That short list is why every site we ship works without any plan at all, and why we build static-first in the first place.
What our care plans cost, and what the fee covers
For owners who would rather not think about any of the above, the studio runs two flat monthly tiers — the same two that are on the website care plans page, priced in the open:
| Plan | Monthly | Per year | Covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Care Basic | $95/month | $1,140 | Hosting & SSL, daily backups kept a month, uptime and security monitoring, platform updates, one minor edit request a month |
| Care Plus | $249/month | $2,988 | Everything in Care Basic, plus unlimited minor edits on fair use, a 2-business-day priority turnaround, and a monthly speed & SEO health report |
Two conditions are part of the price. There is no minimum term — stop a plan in any month and the site keeps running, because you own the code from final payment. And a plan is upkeep, not a second build: new pages and redesigns are quoted separately in writing, so the monthly fee never quietly becomes a retainer.
Do you need a maintenance plan at all?
Honestly — not always, and a maintenance page that never says so is selling, not answering. Skip the plan if the site is static, changes a few times a year, and someone on your side is happy to make those edits and glance at the domain renewal. Take one if edits are regular, if nobody wants to own the checklist, or if the site is how customers reach you and an outage would cost real money the same day. The wrong reason to pay is fear: on a site you own, skipping maintenance means changes wait — not that the site goes dark. If what actually hurts is that the site has grown slow, that is a different job than upkeep — a one-time performance rescue from $1,900 — and a monthly fee will not fix it.
The yearly arithmetic, three routes side by side
| Route | Upkeep per year | Who does the work | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website builder | $192–$468 | The platform, inside the subscription | Payments stop, site stops |
| Self-hosted WordPress | ~$557 | You, your developer, or a retainer — on top of the licences | The labour is unpriced and unskippable |
| Hand-coded static site | $0 mandatory, $1,140 with Care Basic | You — or us, optionally | None: the plan is a convenience, not life support |
Builder range: Wix and Squarespace US plans billed annually, July 2026. WordPress stack: priced at the vendors' pages on 11 August 2026. Care plans: our published rates. The build itself is a separate, one-time number — the full picture is in how much a small business website costs.
If you already own a site and want the upkeep handled, say which tier fits on the care plans page. If you are still choosing what to build, send a 5-minute brief — the quote comes back the same business day, with the maintenance question answered in writing before any work starts.