This is a practical answer to both — the tiers that work, the market rates as published in September 2026, and the arithmetic to price your own instead of copying someone else's page.
What Actually Belongs in a Care Plan
Most plans are assembled from the same eight ingredients: updates, backups, security monitoring, performance checks, support time, reporting, periodic audits and SSL management. The difference between a plan that retains clients and one that churns is not the list — it is which failures the plan promises to catch.
Here is a three-tier structure that maps to what agencies actually deliver.
| Essential | Standard | Ecommerce | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core, plugin, theme updates | Monthly, batched | Weekly, tested on staging | Weekly, tested on staging |
| Backups | Daily, 30-day retention | Daily, off-site, quarterly restore test | Daily + pre-update snapshot, monthly restore test |
| Uptime monitoring | 5-minute checks | 5-minute checks | 1–5 minute checks |
| Page health after updates | Manual spot check | Visual diff on key pages | Visual diff on key pages |
| Journey checks | — | Contact form, daily | Checkout, cart, login — every 5–15 minutes |
| Security | Scan + firewall rules | Scan, hardening, malware cleanup on request | Scan, hardening, malware cleanup included |
| Support time | 30 min/month | 1–2 hours/month | 2–4 hours/month |
| Reporting | Quarterly | Monthly | Monthly, with revenue-flow evidence |
| Response time | 2 business days | 1 business day | Same business day |
The row that separates a modern plan from a 2015 one is journey checks. Updates, backups and uptime all answer "is the site intact?". Only a journey answers "can a customer still buy?" — and on a WooCommerce site, that is the failure that costs the client money and costs you the retainer.
What the Market Charges
Published rates, checked 18 September 2026:
| Source | What it says |
|---|---|
| Codeable | Basic $240/month (staged updates, regression testing, daily backups, 1 hour dev); Advanced $590/month (adds visual regression testing, 2 hours dev, malware cleanup); Enterprise from $1,000/month |
| WP Umbrella | Most care plans $100–$500/month depending on complexity; WooCommerce care plans commonly $250–$500+/month |
| Hourly context (Codeable) | Freelancers $50–$150/hour; agencies $100–$250/hour |
Two things to take from this. First, the floor is higher than most small agencies charge — plans under $100/month are common and are usually mispriced, not competitive. Second, ecommerce carries a premium everywhere, because the consequences are financial and immediate.
Pricing Yours: The Arithmetic
Do not start from a competitor's page. Start from your own cost.
1. Count the recurring hours per site per month. Be honest: updates and verification (30–60 min), monitoring review and alerts (15–30 min), report writing (15–30 min), the support minutes you promise. Call it 1.5–2.5 hours for a standard site.
2. Apply your effective hourly rate, not your aspirational one. If your agency bills $120/hour on projects, use that.
3. Add tooling cost per site. Backups, monitoring, security, staging, the reporting tool — usually $5–$20 per site per month once spread across the roster.
4. Add the incident buffer. Something breaks on roughly one site in ten each month and eats two hours. That is about 12 minutes per site per month of unpriced work; price it.
5. Add margin. A retainer that only covers cost is a liability during a bad month.
Worked example for a standard site: 2 hours × $120 = $240, plus $12 tooling, plus $24 incident buffer, plus 20% margin ≈ $330/month. That lands inside the published ranges and, unlike a copied price, it survives contact with a busy month.
Then sanity-check against value, not just cost. For a store doing $40,000 a month, a plan that keeps checkout monitored and updates tested is cheap at $400. For a five-page brochure site, the same plan is unsellable — which is why the Essential tier exists.
Where Care Plans Leak Money
- Unlimited edits. It sounds generous and reads as unlimited to the client. Cap the minutes, roll over one month at most, and quote anything larger separately.
- Support that arrives by any channel. If requests come by WhatsApp, phone and email, none of them get tracked and none get billed. One channel, one inbox.
- Charging for updates, absorbing the fallout. The update is ten minutes; the plugin conflict it causes is two hours. The buffer above is what covers that.
- Never raising prices. Review annually, in writing, with the previous year's report attached as the argument.
- A plan that cannot prove its worth. If the client cannot see what they got, the renewal conversation is a price negotiation. Send a short monthly report — the WordPress maintenance report template is built for exactly this.
- Selling uptime on an ecommerce site. Uptime monitoring on a store is table stakes. If a plugin update breaks the payment step and you find out from the client, the plan failed regardless of the uptime figure.
How to Sell It Without Discounting
Clients do not buy maintenance; they buy the absence of a bad week. The framing that closes is specific and concrete:
"If a plugin update breaks your checkout at 2pm on a Friday, we know within five minutes and fix it before the weekend. Without this, you find out on Monday from a customer — if they bother to tell you at all."
That sentence does more than a feature list, and it is only honest if your plan actually includes a journey check. Which is the argument for putting one in every tier above Essential: it is the part of the plan you can demonstrate, and the part a cheaper competitor usually does not have.
What to Automate Before You Sell One
A care plan is profitable when the routine work runs itself and you sell judgment rather than clicks.
- Updates and staging tests: a management tool, not manual logins.
- Uptime, SSL, DNS and page health: continuous checks that alert you first.
- Checkout, login and form journeys: scheduled runs in a real browser, so a broken flow is an alert rather than a phone call.
- Reporting: the availability, journey and security numbers should arrive assembled; you write the summary and the recommendations.
That is the difference between an hour per site per month and fifteen minutes — and at ten sites, it is the difference between a care plan being a chore and being the most predictable revenue in the business.