Maintenance is where website budgets quietly leak. Some people pay nothing and get breached. Others pay $400 a month for a 10-page site and call it insurance. Here is the middle ground, with real numbers.
What maintenance actually is
Four jobs, no more:
- Updates. Your site runs on software (CMS, plugins, libraries) that gets security patches. Unpatched sites are how small businesses end up with spam injected into their pages.
- Backups. Not just "backups exist" but "backups restore." I have watched businesses discover their backup system had been failing for 8 months. Nobody checked.
- Monitoring. Uptime checks and security scanning so you find out about problems from an alert, not from a customer.
- Small changes. New photos, a new service page, updated hours, text tweaks. The constant drip of small edits every real business needs.
Fair prices in 2026
| Site type | Fair monthly range | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Brochure site (5-15 pages) | $20 to $80 | Updates, backups, monitoring, small edits |
| Local business with booking | $50 to $120 | Above + booking system checks |
| E-commerce | $80 to $300 | Above + payment health, product updates |
| Custom web app | $150 to $500 | Depends entirely on complexity |
Prices vary by country and who you hire, but the ratios hold. A brochure site costing 5x more than an e-commerce site to maintain is a red flag in any currency.
The three rip-off patterns
The mystery retainer. A round number, no itemization, and "we take care of everything" when you ask. You should be able to see what was done each month, even in 5 lines.
The lock-in plan. Cheap monthly price, but your site is built on their private system and you cannot take it anywhere. The maintenance is cheap; escaping costs a rebuild. Ask "if I leave, what do I walk away with?" If the answer is "nothing," you are renting, not maintaining.
The zero plan. $0/month, everything included forever. What you are actually paying: every future change at premium one-off rates, and a site hosted on their platform under their control. Sometimes that trade is fine. Know that you are making it.
What you can do yourself (and should)
- Write and update your own content. Modern sites make this easy. If yours does not, that is a build problem, not a you problem.
- Check your own site once a month on your phone. Load the pages. Fill in the contact form. Order process too. You will catch more real problems than most monitoring tools.
- Keep your payment and email subscriptions in your own name, not your developer's.
What is worth paying for
The technical layer. Updates, backups, monitoring, and security response are specialist work with boring, critical consequences. A fair plan here costs less per year than one hour of a lawyer, and prevents the worst week of your business year.
My own setup, for transparency
For the small business sites I build, maintenance is usually $30 to $60 per month: managed hosting, daily backups with a quarterly restore test, updates, uptime monitoring, and a batch of small content changes. Clients who prefer to handle everything themselves get the site set up so they can, plus a document of what to check and when. Both options are fine. Paying for things you could do is only a rip-off when nobody told you that you could do them.
If you want a second opinion on a maintenance quote you are looking at, send it over. I will tell you plainly which line items are real.