The short answer
A properly maintained small-business website costs £65–£145 a month with us, hosting included — or £0 if you self-manage. Market guides for the UK put typical cover anywhere from £30 for bare-bones plans to £550 for premium e-commerce retainers, with most business plans landing between £75 and £200 a month; US budgets typically run $95–$195. The spread exists because "maintenance" means wildly different things from one provider to the next.
What "maintenance" should actually mean
Strip the packaging away and a maintenance plan is buying you six things. When you compare quotes, check each one is actually in there:
- Hosting & SSL — the server your site lives on and the certificate that keeps the padlock in the browser. Some plans charge for maintenance on top of hosting you buy separately; ours includes it.
- Backups — daily, automatic, and restorable. A backup nobody has ever test-restored is a hope, not a backup.
- Uptime monitoring — someone (or something) notices your site is down before your customers tell you.
- Security patches — updates applied before vulnerabilities are exploited, not after.
- Content edits — the small monthly changes: prices, team photos, opening hours, a new testimonial.
- Performance care — keeping the site fast as content grows, because speed affects both conversions and Google rankings.
What we charge, exactly
| Plan | Monthly price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Self-managed | £0 | Full code handover, deployment guide, your DNS — you own everything and run it yourself. |
| Website Care | £65 (~$85) | Managed hosting & SSL, daily backups, uptime monitoring, security patches, 30 minutes of content edits a month. |
| Website Care+ | £145 (~$185) | Everything in Care plus 2 hours of edits or development time, speed & Core Web Vitals optimisation, a plain-English monthly report and priority response. |
Care plans are rolling monthly, cancel anytime, hosting included — the prices above are the prices. Or ask us anything on a free call first.
Both plans are rolling monthly with no minimum term — the same numbers published on our pricing page. If you cancel, you keep the site and we hand everything over cleanly.
Why our plans undercut the typical £75–£200
Not generosity — architecture. Most maintenance pricing exists to service the fragility of the platform underneath: a page-builder WordPress stack with fifteen plugins needs constant patching, compatibility testing and emergency fixes, and someone has to be paid to do it. We build static-first, low-dependency sites, so there's simply less that can break. The honest conclusion cuts both ways: if your current site needs £200/mo just to stay upright, that's a signal about the build, not the maintenance market.
When £0 is genuinely the right answer
Plenty of businesses should self-manage, and we say so at handover. You're a good candidate if you have anyone mildly technical in-house, your content rarely changes, and your site isn't a lead machine where an hour of downtime costs real money. The failure mode to avoid isn't "no plan" — it's no owner: nobody renewing the domain, nobody holding the backups, nobody noticing the SSL expired on a Saturday. If someone owns those, £0 works fine.
One warning about "free maintenance included": some agencies bundle a year of free cover, then move you to a pricier plan that's hard to leave because they control your hosting, domain or code. Whatever provider you choose, confirm in writing that you own the domain, the code and the content — and that you can take all three with you.
Questions we hear a lot
Do I have to take a maintenance plan with my website?
No. Every site we build can be self-managed at £0/mo — we hand over the full code, deployment documentation and DNS, and you own everything. A care plan is for businesses that would rather never think about hosting, backups or security patches again.
Why is your care plan cheaper than the £75–£200 most agencies charge?
Because we build static-first, low-maintenance sites — no plugin stack that needs weekly patching. Most maintenance pricing exists to service the fragility of the platform underneath. Our £65/mo covers hosting, SSL, daily backups, uptime monitoring, security patches and 30 minutes of content edits, and it's rolling monthly with no lock-in.
What happens if I cancel the care plan?
You keep the site. Plans are rolling monthly — cancel anytime and we hand over code, content and DNS cleanly so you or another provider can take it from there. Maintenance should be a service you choose to keep, not a hostage situation.
Keep reading: How much does a website cost? · Website redesign cost · Website & care plan pricing