Web design maintenance contract: what to charge and cover

What to take away

What the range covers

A maintenance retainer is a bundle: hosting oversight, core and plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security scanning, small content edits, and a named response time. The price tracks how much of that is done for the client and how fast they expect an answer.

A solo studio in a mid-size US market can run a care plan on a few hours a month. A ten-person agency supporting ecommerce or a regulated client needs on-call coverage, staging environments, and documented change control, which is a different product at a different price.

Line by line

The table below is a planning range, not a rate card. Every figure is illustrative and should be reset against your own cost of delivery.

One-off work is quoted separately: a full security audit, a platform migration, a redesign of a template set, or an accessibility remediation pass. A service-level agreement belongs in the contract only if you can staff the response window.

Fixed against variable

Fixed cost is what you pay whether or not the client calls: hosting, licenses, monitoring tools, and the staff hours reserved for their account. Variable cost is the work itself, which rises with ticket volume.

A healthy retainer prices the fixed base plus an allowance for variable work, with an hourly rate for anything past the allowance. Agencies that quote a flat fee with unlimited edits are selling an option, and the client will exercise it. Track hours against each account with time tracking so the allowance is based on history rather than hope.

The same logic applies to how you price project work before maintenance begins, which is covered in Pricing a web design retainer across the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin.

What the tools do not include

Monitoring software tells you a site is down. It does not tell you the client's checkout is failing because a payment plugin changed its API. A backup plugin stores files. It does not restore them correctly during an incident unless someone has tested the restore.

So the retainer has to fund a person, not just a stack. Budget for the hours spent reading alerts, testing updates on staging, and writing the short monthly note that tells the client what happened. If those hours are not in the price, they come out of project margin.

Where budgets leak

Scope creep is the first leak. A client on the Essential tier asks for a landing page and you say yes to keep the relationship. That page is a one-off project, and it should be quoted as one.

Tax is the second. Several states tax digital services, and the rules differ on whether maintenance is a service or a sale of software. Check the state revenue department for the client's billing address, and see Sales tax nexus after Wayfair for agencies in Washington and Illinois for how nexus changes the math.

A retainer that is not reviewed every twelve months drifts into a discount. Raise the price or cut the scope, but do not let the gap widen.

Staffing is the third. If you bring a contractor in to cover overflow, the classification rules apply, and the IRS explains them in its independent contractor definition.

Common questions