Most businesses are not overpaying for maintenance, they are paying a fair rate for a product they have misread. The bands buy structurally different things, and the fastest way to know which one you are in is to add up what you paid on top of the plan last year.
There is no single right number, which is a useless answer, so here is the useful version: the price is not the problem. Almost nobody I speak to is paying the wrong amount. They are paying a fair price for a service they have misunderstood.
So this is less a price list than a way to audit what you are already buying. The bands are below, but the questions further down are the part that changes anything.
The one line item nobody reviews
Maintenance is the one line item nobody reviews. It was set up during the build, it renews quietly, and three years later it is still the same amount for a site that has doubled in importance.
That drift runs both ways. Some businesses pay for a premium plan on a site that publishes twice a year. Others run a booking system that carries most of their revenue on a plan designed for a brochure. Both are paying a fair market rate. Only one of them is going to have a bad quarter about it.
What the market charges
| Band | Monthly | What it realistically covers |
|---|---|---|
| Basic care | €35 to €90 | Updates, backups, uptime checks. Mostly automated, reviewed in bulk. |
| Small business care | €90 to €230 | The above, plus a human looking occasionally and a small amount of content help. |
| Ecommerce or higher assurance | €230 to €650 | Faster response, staging, more careful update handling because breakage costs money. |
| Growth retainer | From about €800 | Maintenance plus a modest amount of actual work each month. |
| Fractional retainer | €1,200 to €5,000 | Ownership of the outcome, retained development time, someone watching between requests. |
| Agency retainer | €1,500 to €19,500 | Team capacity across specialisms. Below about €2,300 this typically funds execution only. |
Prices vary across Europe and these are bands rather than quotes. The useful part is not the exact figure, it is which row you are actually in versus which row you think you are in.
The audit: six questions for whoever you pay now
Send these in one email. The answers tell you more than any price comparison.
1. When did you last restore a backup, rather than take one? Taking backups is easy and nearly universal. Restoring one is the only proof they work. If nobody has ever tested a restore, you do not have backups, you have files.
2. What would you have to notice for me to hear from you? This is the question that separates the bands. Many plans are reactive by design: you report, they act. That is a legitimate product and worth knowing you have bought.
3. If the contact form stopped delivering, would anything alert you? Usually no, and usually nothing in the plan promised otherwise. Uptime monitoring watches whether the site answers, not whether it works.
4. What is explicitly not included? A good provider answers this immediately and without defensiveness. A vague answer here is the actual finding.
5. How much of last year’s invoices were the plan, and how much was quoted work on top? If the extras consistently exceed the plan, you are on the wrong product and have been paying more than a retainer would have cost.
6. If I left tomorrow, what would you hand me? The answer should be credentials, a copy of everything, and a document explaining how it runs. If it is “we would export the site”, you are more locked in than you think.
Two years of backups nobody could use
A site I took over had been backed up every night for two years without fail. The schedule ran, the dashboard was green, and the files were being written into a directory the web server would hand to anyone who asked for it. So the backups both had never been tested and were themselves a data breach waiting to be noticed.
The monthly invoice for that plan was entirely fair for what it said it did. Nobody was overcharging. It is just that “backups” appeared on a feature list, and everybody involved read that word to mean something different.
Those are the bands other people charge. The more useful number is the one you are already paying, and it is larger than the invoice: the cost calculator adds the plan to the staff hours and the downtime, which is where most of it actually goes.
What no maintenance plan includes at any price
Worth being direct about, because it is the source of most disappointment.
Change is not included. Improvements are not included. Noticing something you have not reported is not included. Those are not omissions or sharp practice, they are simply a different product, and a plan priced at €90 could not possibly contain them.
If what you actually want is somebody thinking about your systems between your requests, no amount of maintenance plan gets you there, because it is a category difference rather than a tier difference. I have written that comparison out properly in a maintenance plan vs a fractional retainer.
When paying more is right, and when it is not
Pay more when something on the site carries revenue directly, when a day of downtime costs real money, when several people depend on it working, or when you find yourself quoting for small changes every month.
Do not pay more when the site is a brochure that rarely changes, nothing commercially important runs through it, and a bad day would be an inconvenience. A €90 plan on a site like that is correct and I would tell you so rather than sell you something larger.
The mistake is treating this as a quality ladder where more money means better care. It is not a ladder. The bands buy structurally different things, and buying up without needing to is simply waste.
Ask what you paid for on top of the plan
One question, and it settles it faster than any comparison table.
“In the last twelve months, what did I pay for on top of the plan, and why was it not in the plan?”
If the answer is almost nothing, your plan fits. Stay where you are and stop reading about this.
If the answer is a series of small invoices for small changes, you are paying retainer money in instalments while receiving none of the benefits of one. That is the most common situation I find, and it is worth fixing purely on arithmetic, before anyone gets to the argument about ownership.
Ask for last year’s total, not the monthly figure. Plan plus extras plus emergency work is the number you are actually spending, and it is frequently double what anybody remembers agreeing to.