How to price a WordPress care plan in 2026

The most common care plan price we see from agencies is somewhere between $49 and $79 a month. The most common complaint we hear from the same agencies is that care plans are not worth the hassle.

Those two facts are related.

A care plan priced at $49 is priced like a plugin bundle: backups plus updates plus a security scan, divided by a number that feels safe to say out loud. A care plan priced at $249 is priced like what it actually is: an insurance policy, a support desk, and a standing relationship with the people who built the site. Same deliverables, very different business.

This guide walks through how to land on a price you can defend, in three steps.

Step 1: Price the outcome, not the checklist

Ask what the site is worth to the client per month. For a law firm doing $2M a year, a day of downtime or a hacked homepage is a five-figure problem. For a local bakery, a broken order form on a Saturday is a few hundred dollars and a bad review.

Your care plan is the thing that makes those problems go away quickly. The price should feel like a small fraction of the cost of the problem, not a large fraction of the cost of the plugins.

A useful framing to say out loud to a client:

“If the site goes down on a Friday afternoon, what does that cost you by Monday?”

Whatever they say, your monthly price should be comfortably below it. For most businesses that puts the floor at $149 and the ceiling well above $500.

Step 2: Build three tiers, and make the middle one obvious

Tiering is not about giving people choice. It is about anchoring. A single $199 plan is a yes/no decision. Three plans at $99, $199, and $399 turn the decision into “which one,” and most clients pick the middle.

Here is a tier structure that works across almost every market we have seen:

	Essential	Professional	Premium
Price	$99–149	$199–299	$399–599
Updates & backups	Weekly	Daily	Daily + real-time
Security scans	Monthly	Weekly	Daily + firewall
Content edits	1 / month	Up to 5 / month	Unlimited
Support turnaround	48 hours	24 hours	Same day
Monthly report	Yes	Yes	Yes + quarterly call
Emergency fixes	Billed separately	Included	Included, priority

Notice what moves between tiers: speed, volume, and attention. Not the fundamentals. Every tier gets backups and updates, because a plan without them is not a care plan.

Notice also that the top tier exists mainly to make the middle tier look reasonable. If a quarter of your clients take Premium, raise all three prices.

Step 3: Check the margin

Now compare the price to your cost of delivery. If you run delivery in-house, be honest about the hours: a “quick” plugin update that breaks a page builder layout is a two-hour afternoon. If you outsource delivery to a white-label retainer, the math is simpler because the cost is flat.

Say you have 15 sites on Professional at $199. That is $2,985 a month in care plan revenue. A mid-tier white-label retainer costs about $1,499, which leaves roughly $1,486 in gross profit, a 50% margin, with no staff time in the loop. Add ten more sites at the same tier and revenue jumps to $4,975 while the retainer stays flat. Margin climbs to 70%.

That is the shape of a good care plan business: revenue scales with sites, cost scales with tiers, and the gap between them widens.

Three pricing mistakes to avoid

Charging less for sites you built. Agencies often discount the care plan for their own builds, as if maintenance is an apology for the site. It is the opposite. Your builds are the easiest sites to support; charge full price.

Bundling hosting into the plan. Hosting has a hard cost, support tickets of its own, and makes it painful to raise prices later. Sell hosting as a separate line item or recommend a host and stay out of it.

Pricing per hour inside the plan. The moment you say “includes 2 hours,” clients start counting. Price per outcome (“up to 5 content edits,” “unlimited small fixes”) and let the plan absorb the variance.

Raising prices on existing clients

If your current plans are underpriced, you do not have to fix everything at once. Launch the new tiers for new clients first. Then, at the next renewal, move existing clients to the new structure with a 60-day notice and a clear list of what they are now getting that they were not before: faster turnaround, a monthly report, email support. Most will stay. The ones who leave were costing you money.

The short version

• Price against the cost of the problem, not the cost of the tools.
• Three tiers, middle one obvious, top one as an anchor.
• Keep the fundamentals in every tier; sell speed and volume up the ladder.
• Check margin against a flat delivery cost, then add sites.

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