Here's the honest monthly math for a typical local-business website: hosting runs about $5–$50 a month, a domain about $15 a year, and a maintenance plan—if you genuinely need one—typically $50–$300 a month. And here's the part maintenance vendors won't lead with: a well-built modern site often needs close to $0 a month.
Whether you're on the $0 end or the $300 end should be a fact about your website, not about who's billing you. Let's sort out which is which.
What "maintenance" actually covers
The word bundles four different things, and unbundling them is how you evaluate any fee:
| Item | Typical monthly cost | Do you need it? |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | $5–$50 | Always—it's what keeps the site online |
| Domain | About $15/year | Always |
| Software updates | $0 on modern builds; real work on plugin-heavy platforms | Depends entirely on how the site was built |
| Content changes & support | $50–$300 as a plan, or hourly as needed | Only if changes are actually happening |
The first two are commodities—nobody should mark them up much. The last two are where fees are honest or aren't.
What a monthly maintenance plan usually includes
Most maintenance "packages" come in two or three tiers. The names vary—Basic, Pro, Care, Growth—but the contents are fairly consistent:
| Tier | Typical monthly price | What it usually buys |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting and updates | around $50–$150 | Hosting, backups, security and software updates, and someone watching that the site stays up |
| Hosting, updates, and edits | around $150–$300 | All of the above, plus a small allowance of changes (often an hour or two a month) and a faster response promise |
| Anything above that | varies | Should be buying specific work you can point to, like new pages or SEO. Ask for it itemized |
Pick the tier that matches how often your site actually changes. If you can't remember the last time you asked for an edit, the edits tier is paying for hours you don't use. And on a modern build with little to update, the first tier is mostly hosting with a markup. That's worth knowing before you pay $100 a month for hosting that costs a fraction of that.
Why some sites genuinely need monthly work
Sites built on plugin-heavy platforms accumulate security patches the way a car accumulates oil changes: skip them long enough and things genuinely break, or worse, get broken into. If that's your site, updates are a real service with real value—the typical $50–$150/month tier of a care plan is buying actual labor.
Booking systems, online stores, and membership areas also change the math. When software processes payments or appointments, "it stopped working" costs you money by the hour, and a support arrangement with a response-time promise is reasonable insurance.
When $0 a month is the correct answer
A modern marketing site—built without a stack of plugins, on managed hosting—has remarkably little that needs monthly attention. It doesn't rust. What it needs is content attention: hours, prices, services, and photos that stay true. That's work you can do yourself if the site was handed over properly, or pay for by the hour when it comes up.
This is how we build: our sites come with the accounts in your name, the ability to make routine text and image changes yourself, and no required maintenance contract. When you want ongoing help, you pay for visible work—not a retainer on standby. (Full pricing context is in our website cost guide.)
The fees worth questioning
Three patterns deserve a direct question:
The unexplained legacy fee. A monthly charge that predates everyone's memory. Ask for an itemized breakdown; "hosting and maintenance" is a phrase, not an itemization.
The hostage arrangement. Fees that exist because the developer holds your domain, your hosting, or your only admin login. This is the quiet cousin of the DIY-platform lock-in problem—either way, leaving means rebuilding. Whoever built your site, the domain and hosting should be registered to you.
Insurance on an empty calendar. A $200/month plan whose last visible output was months ago. Support plans are legitimate when changes are frequent; when they're not, hourly is honest.
A fair test for any fee: ask what happened last quarter under it. Real answers list updates shipped, changes made, problems handled. Vague answers are the answer.
Five questions to ask before you sign a plan
- How many hours of changes are included, and do unused hours roll over? Many plans don't roll them over, so an allowance you rarely touch is money spent on nothing.
- What's the response time, in writing? "We're very responsive" isn't a number. If your site takes bookings or payments, it should be.
- Whose name are the domain, hosting, and admin login in? If the answer isn't yours, part of the fee is paying for access to your own site.
- What do I walk away with if I cancel? Your files, a recent backup, and every login, with no exit fee.
- What on my site actually needs updating? If the honest answer is "very little," a lighter plan or paying by the hour is the right fit.
The cheapest maintenance is a site built right
Most maintenance pain is a build-quality problem wearing a subscription disguise. A site assembled from twenty plugins needs constant tending; a site built cleanly mostly doesn't. So when you're comparing quotes for a new site, ask each developer: what will this cost me monthly, and what happens if I pay nothing? The answers are more revealing than the build price—and a builder confident in their work will happily put "almost nothing" in writing.
That conversation is exactly what our web development service starts with: a fixed quote for the build, the true monthly costs in writing, and everything registered in your name from day one.