What to include (and leave out) of your care plan tiers
The deliverables that make a care plan feel valuable, the ones that make it unprofitable, and how to split them across three tiers.
A care plan is a bundle, and bundles are decided by what you leave out as much as by what you put in. Most agencies make the same mistake: they cram everything into one plan to make it sound impressive, then discover they are delivering $400 of work for $99.
Here is how to think about the contents.
The non-negotiables (every tier)
These belong in every plan because a plan without them is not care, it is a discount on hourly work.
- Core, plugin, and theme updates, applied on a schedule and tested after.
- Backups, off-site, with a documented restore.
- Security monitoring, at minimum a scheduled malware scan and login hardening.
- Uptime monitoring, with someone who acts on the alert.
- A support address the client can email.
- A monthly report, because invisible work is unpaid work.
If your lowest tier does not have all six, raise its price until it does.
The dials (what changes between tiers)
Tiers should differ on speed, volume, and attention. Those are the things clients can feel.
Speed. Turnaround on requests: 48 hours, 24 hours, same day. This is the easiest upgrade to sell and the hardest to deliver in-house, which is why it is worth paying a retainer for.
Volume. Content edits per month: one, five, unlimited. Set the top tier to unlimited; very few clients abuse it, and “unlimited” is a word that closes.
Attention. Scan frequency, backup frequency, a quarterly review call, performance work. These signal that the top tier is being watched more closely.
Things that look like value but drain margin
Hosting. Hosting has hard costs, its own support burden, and makes clients feel trapped. Recommend a host, manage the account if you must, but bill it as a separate line.
SEO and content. “Monthly blog post” turns a maintenance plan into a content agency with a $199 budget. Sell content separately at content prices.
Design changes. “Small design tweaks” is a phrase that has no bottom. Content edits are fine (text, images, a new team member). Layout changes are a task on the top tier or a quote on the others.
Unlimited phone support. Email support scales; phone support does not. Keep phone for the top tier, if at all.
Licenses you pay for. If you bundle premium plugin licenses, know exactly what they cost you per site and make sure the lowest tier still clears it.
A worked example
Here is a three-tier structure we see work across markets, with the dials visible:
Essential, $149. The six non-negotiables. Weekly updates, weekly backups, monthly scan. One content edit a month. 48-hour turnaround. Emergency fixes billed separately.
Professional, $249. Everything in Essential, moved up: daily backups, weekly scans, up to five content edits, 24-hour turnaround, emergency fixes included, basic performance tuning.
Premium, $499. Everything in Professional, plus: daily scans and a firewall, unlimited content edits, same-day turnaround, priority emergency support, a quarterly call, and staging for anything risky.
The jump from Essential to Professional is mostly speed and inclusion. The jump to Premium is mostly attention. Both are things you can explain in one sentence.
Name the tiers for the client, not for you
“Bronze, Silver, Gold” tells a client nothing. “Essential, Professional, Premium” tells them who each one is for. Even better is naming them after the kind of site: “Brochure,” “Business,” “Store.” Clients self-select faster when the name describes them.
One page, not a spreadsheet
Put the tiers on a single page with three columns and no more than ten rows. If a feature needs a footnote, it does not belong in the table. The goal is for a client to look at it for fifteen seconds and know which column they are in.