Website maintenance,
without the padding.

"Maintenance" is used loosely, and that vagueness is where overcharging hides. In practice it covers four separate things, and a good plan says which of them you're buying:

• Keeping the lights on: hosting, the domain renewal, and a valid SSL certificate. Mostly automatic, and it should not be expensive.
• Keeping it safe and current: platform and dependency updates, backups, and uptime monitoring.
• Keeping it accurate: the small edits — hours, prices, staff, photos, seasonal notices — that go stale within months if nobody owns them.
• Keeping it improving: new sections and pages as the business changes. This is project work, and it should be quoted separately.

A five-page brochure site is not a web application. It does not need weekly patching or a daily performance report. Realistically it needs:

• A domain that renews without anyone remembering to renew it.
• An SSL certificate that renews itself before it expires.
• Backups, so a mistake is a five-minute fix rather than a rebuild.
• Someone who answers when a form stops delivering.
• A cheap, quick way to change text.

If a proposal is heavy on dashboards and light on "who fixes it when it breaks", that's the wrong balance.

Small business maintenance in 2026 typically runs $20–$150 a month, and the spread is mostly about how much human editing time is included, not about servers.

Our own plans are $35 a month on Essential, $25 on Signature, and $15 on Premium, with the first year included on Premium builds. They cover routine edits, monitoring and priority support. If you'd rather not have a plan, any single update is a flat $9.99 — and hosting, the domain and SSL stay included regardless. A cancelled or lapsed care plan never takes a site offline; it only ends the included edits and priority support.

• Your site goes offline if you stop paying the monthly fee.
• The domain is registered in the provider's name and can't be transferred out.
• A twelve-month minimum term on what is nominally a monthly service.
• Hourly billing with a one-hour minimum for a two-line text change.
• "Unlimited edits" with no definition of what counts as an edit.
• SEO retainers that promise rankings. Nobody can promise rankings.

If you'd rather self-manage, the minimum discipline is: keep the registrar login somewhere you'll find it, put the domain renewal in your calendar, check the padlock in the address bar every few months, and test your contact form quarterly by sending yourself a message.

Most owners we work with try that for a year, then take a plan — not because it's technically hard, but because it's the sort of thing that quietly slips.