I’ve been running a web agency since 2010, and website care plans are the most profitable service we offer. We’re currently at $20k MRR from maintenance and support packages alone — recurring revenue that isn’t tied to projects, hours, or luck.
This guide is the complete playbook: everything I’ve learned selling these packages since 2017. Why the traditional agency and hosting model fails clients, how to package a care plan they’ll actually want, what to charge, and how to pitch it service by service. I wish I had this when I started.
Who this is for: freelancers and agencies building or maintaining client websites who want predictable recurring revenue that isn’t traded for hours.
Escaping the feast-or-famine cycle
I started siebird.com in 2010 with the traditional agency model — all income tied to projects or hourly work. I got tired of the feast-or-famine cycle you always hear about. That was me.
Depending on the client’s site, I sold website hosting for $300/year or more. At the time I thought it was great compared to legacy providers like GoDaddy. It was extra money coming in once a year that I didn’t have before.
But I never liked traditional retainers — selling your time at a discounted rate and rolling over unused hours. It never sat well with me, and it still doesn’t.
Time is our most valuable resource. Stop trading your time for money.
I desperately wanted:
- stability with my income
- predictability with revenue
- a service that wasn’t tied to my time
- a service that would relatively scale
Necessity is the mother of invention. So I started to outline the process of effectively hosting, maintaining, and supporting a client site — and that outline became the care plan model in this guide.
Why the traditional hosting model is broken
As my business grew, I noticed the same issues surface in conversations with clients and prospects, over and over.
Clients were frustrated with their prior agency for several reasons:
- Unexpected spikes in monthly bills
- Difficulty budgeting support for their website
- Headaches scrutinizing invoice line items and timesheets
Then there’s the runaround. Their site goes down or a problem surfaces, so they open a ticket with the hosting provider — and wait anxiously, only to hear support can’t help. The ticket gets closed and they’re told to chase down the agency that built the site.
The same happens in reverse: the client contacts the agency that built the site, the agency explains it’s a hosting problem outside their control, deflects it back to the hosting provider, and washes their hands clean.
You can see the vicious cycle this service model creates:
- The client feels helpless and frustrated
- The agency gets headaches because the client assumed they were responsible for hosting
- It’s never clear to the client who to contact when they have a need
- Hourly billing doesn’t incentivize agencies to get faster or better
- Hourly billing penalizes the client if the agency is incompetent
This is an excellent opportunity to educate clients during sales and build trust. Most clients don’t even realize this fragmentation is a problem until you bring it to light. Once you do — and position yourself as the single accountable partner — they recognize the value immediately. You become the solution.
What a care plan must protect
Your client’s website is their greatest marketing asset. They’ve invested thousands of marketing dollars into it. And they’re not equipped to care for it themselves:
- They didn’t build the site
- They don’t know the code
- They can’t run software updates or patches
- They don’t know what to do if the server crashes
- They can’t recover the site if disaster happens
They need professionals on call in an emergency. A care plan is a massive safety net at a fraction of the cost of the alternative.
The essential components go far beyond a hosting service:
- A reliable, performant hosting solution
- Version-controlled software to track changes or roll back versions
- Offsite nightly monitored backups
- Uptime monitoring so you know the moment their site goes down
- Frequent security and framework updates
- Firewalls protecting against a range of threats
- A content delivery network to serve their content efficiently
- Third-party API upkeep with external services
- Maintenance and support requests
- Priority access to you
To a client, it’s “just a website.” Really, that’s the tip of the iceberg. Once you reveal all the layers involved in properly maintaining a site, they understand the value. You’re essentially selling an insurance policy for their website — with you assuming the risks on their behalf.
Dropping hourly billing
The second-best decision I ever made in my business was dropping my hourly rate.
To defend that position with clients, you need to understand the pitfalls of hourly billing:
- Hourly billing positions you as a commodity
- It focuses on the inputs of a project, not the outcomes
- The incentives for both parties are fundamentally flawed
- There’s no incentive for you to become better at what you do
- The client is penalized for your inefficiencies or lack of experience
- There are only 24 hours in a day — your income is capped
Once you can articulate those problems, clients soften to project-based and fixed pricing. It just makes sense: focus on the outcomes, not the hours.
Since I stopped charging hourly, I have not had to defend one bill or line-item question. Profit margins have increased, and my income is no longer tied to my time. It’s incredibly liberating — and it’s the foundation the care plan model is built on.
Packaging the offer
Now that we understand the client’s pain points, the goal is to pack as much value into one simple offer as possible — so they never have to piece together multiple services to keep their site healthy.
We do all the work and bundle everything into a fixed monthly cost that’s easy to budget. Here’s what we offer at $600/month:
- Website hosting — pick a simple cloud provider like DigitalOcean that makes server management easy
- Server provisioning — take the pain out of managing servers and deployments with a tool like Forge or Ploi
- Git — a modern development workflow with git deployments via GitHub or similar
- Backups — automated nightly offsite backups of the database and files (I use SnapShooter)
- Website monitoring — know instantly when a site goes down (I use Oh Dear; it monitors far more than uptime)
- Security & framework updates — monthly CMS, plugin, and patch updates to keep pace with releases
- Web application firewall — protection against online threats via Cloudflare or Sucuri
- Content delivery network — distribute site assets globally for performance (Cloudflare again)
- Website analytics — privacy-focused analytics with Fathom or Plausible
- Maintenance requests — unlimited small changes and content updates (30 minutes or less)
- Priority response — paying clients get guaranteed access to you
- Monthly reports — show clients their website performance and everything you did that month
This is how you position a maintenance and support service — instead of selling bundled discounted hours and a basic server.
Free proposal template
The exact proposal template I use
Every service in this playbook, packaged into a client-ready proposal. Brand it, adapt it, and start pitching.
The sales pitch, service by service
The key lies in education and changing thought patterns. This is where positioning and selling come together.
Don’t just send the proposal and let the client decide alone. Walk them through every service in the package so they understand why it exists. I do this with a ~10 minute video walkthrough of the proposal (a simple screen recording works), which:
- educates the client during the decision-making phase
- shifts their perspective on each service
- answers common questions before they’re asked
- counters objections before they cost you the sale
- demonstrates the overall value
Here are my playbooks for pitching each component.
Hosting — shifting perspectives
The easiest objection a client can raise is comparing $25/month shared hosting to your $600 price tag. If you let that comparison stand, you lose the sale.
It’s not apples to apples. Walk them through the broken relationship between client, agency, and hosting provider: if their site goes down, they chase the host; if their site has a bug, they chase the agency. With your care plan:
- The segmented relationship is gone
- You manage the server and can quickly fix server issues
- You built the site and can quickly fix a bug
- If anything goes wrong, they have a single point of contact
Git — why we use it
Most clients have never heard of version control, so explain what it replaces (the fragile FTP workflow) and what it gives them:
- A full history of every change to their codebase
- Easy rollbacks if something goes wrong
- Significantly faster, safer deployments
- A redundant backup of the site’s code
Backups — restoring when disaster strikes
Clients assume they’re protected if backups exist somewhere. Compare it to tools: it’s one thing to have the right tool for the job, another to have someone who knows how to use it.
Ask the client if they’d know how to restore their site after a disaster. They’ll quickly say no. That’s the shift — you manage the backups and have the expertise to restore them. The risk moves from them to you.
Monitoring — track more than just uptime
The biggest benefit of actively monitoring client sites: you’re alerted before the frantic phone call.
- You act quickly the moment a site goes down
- The client has confidence the site is watched
- You know before they, their staff, or their customers do
- You can monitor beyond uptime — SSL certificates, broken links, performance, domain expiration, DNS record changes — and flag issues proactively
Software updates — the oil change
This one’s easy to demonstrate: have the client log into their site and count the pending updates.
It’s like changing the oil in a car — skip it for months and you risk seizing the engine. Actively maintained sites get:
- Current releases of the CMS and plugins
- New features as they ship
- Bug fixes for the software running their site
- Patches for known security vulnerabilities
WAF & CDN — protection and performance
Bundle these together in the pitch: you’re protecting their site from a range of online threats (SQL injection, DDoS) and distributing it globally for speed. Every layer builds value in the package.
API upkeep — the integrations nobody thinks about
Their site is almost certainly connected to third-party services — a CRM, an email platform, automation tools. Those services change, break, lose connection, and drift out of sync. Educate the client on the risk and offer to properly maintain those integrations.
Unlimited maintenance requests — the psychological anchor
This is where your time leverage and years of experience shine, and where the package’s value is most evident.
90% of client requests take 30 minutes or less. “Can you add this image?” “Can you show me how to change the form notifications?”
Rather than the client trying to calculate how many hours they might need each month, shift them to unlimited access to you. In all my years selling these, no client has ever abused it.
Talking points:
- Anchor on the fact that 90% of requests fall in the 30-minute window
- They never worry about monthly support usage
- They get access to your knowledge and expertise — think fractional web developer
- It’s easy to budget
Priority support — first in line
Paying clients should always have first access to you. Assure them you’ll be there when they need you: no estimates and approval cycles slowing things down, and non-paying clients go to the back of the line.
Monthly reports — make the invisible visible
Bundle up everything you do each month so the client sees the benefits they’re getting. Detailed reports keep clients informed, reinforce trust, and let them track the tangible value they’re receiving. It’s the difference between a line item they question and a partnership they renew.
Delivering and pricing over time
Once you’ve packaged the offer and refined the pitch, two things determine how far this goes: how you present it, and how you price it over time.
On presentation — walking a client through the proposal on video takes roughly 10 minutes, and it’s worth every second. There are so many assumptions and objections a client can quietly make on their own; the walkthrough lets you direct them through the process instead. Nothing fancy required.
On pricing — experiment constantly. Keep raising rates until clients stop paying. Use judgment on fit: don’t pitch a mom-and-pop business the way you’d pitch a 7- or 8-figure company. I started my base packages at $300/month in 2017. Today the same service is $500–$600/month.
The delivery problem
The hardest part of this business has always been demonstrating the behind-the-scenes work. Clients can’t see the code changes you shipped, can’t access their backups, can’t view the monitoring you run. All that value you’re delivering is invisible — until the one month something breaks.
That’s the problem I built Burrow to solve. It automates the reporting side of these packages, giving clients real-time access to what’s happening on their site and what you do for them every month — deploys, backups, uptime, forms, updates, all in one timeline.
If you’re building out care plans and want the delivery side handled for you, that’s exactly what we’re making.