The comparison owners make
A care plan is $99 a month, so about $1,200 a year. Hourly support is $80 an hour, and you might need five hours a year. That is $400. Hourly wins, obviously.
The comparison is wrong in three places, and each one is worth understanding before deciding.
Mistake 1: hourly only counts the hours you ask for
A care plan does work every month whether or not you ask: updates on staging, backups checked, security scanned, forms tested, uptime monitored. Hourly support does none of that unless you request it, and nobody requests "please check my backups restored". So under hourly, the routine work does not happen. The site decays, and the decay is what produces the emergencies.
The honest hourly comparison includes the routine work at the hourly rate. Two hours a month of updates, checks and cleanup at $80 is $1,920 a year, before a single emergency. The care plan is already cheaper.
Mistake 2: emergencies are not five hours
The site is hacked. The contact form died four months ago and nobody noticed. A plugin update broke the checkout on a Saturday. These are the calls hourly support actually receives, and they are not one-hour jobs. A hack cleanup is a day or two. A dead form that lost four months of enquiries cost more than any invoice.
Emergencies under hourly billing also arrive at emergency rates and emergency availability. The developer who charges $80 an hour for planned work is not necessarily free on Saturday, and the one who is charges more.
A single emergency a year, at a day's work plus the business cost of the outage, exceeds the care plan. Most unmaintained sites have one.
Mistake 3: hourly has no response time
Under a care plan, the response time is written down: one business day, four hours for emergencies on the higher tiers. Under hourly, you are in a queue behind the developer's paying projects. "I'll look at it next week" is a common answer to an hourly client with a down site, and it is a reasonable answer from the developer's point of view, because you are not paying them to be available.
Availability is what a monthly fee buys. It is invisible until the day you need it, and on that day it is the whole value.
The year, honestly
For a typical small business site:
| | Hourly | Care plan (Basic) | | --- | --- | --: | | Routine monthly work, if done | ~$1,900 | included | | Routine monthly work, if skipped | $0, and the site decays | included | | One emergency a year | $600 to $1,500 plus lost business | usually prevented; covered if not | | Small changes | $80 each | one hour a month included | | Response time | none guaranteed | one business day | | Year total | $400 if nothing goes wrong; $2,500 plus if it does | ~$1,200, predictable |
Hourly is cheaper only in the year nothing goes wrong and nothing is maintained. That year is borrowed from the next one.
When hourly genuinely wins
There are honest cases:
- A static site that never changes, on a platform with no plugins to update, where the only risk is the host. A one-page brochure on a managed builder, say.
- A business with an in-house person who actually does the routine work and only needs a specialist occasionally.
- A site about to be replaced, where investing in maintenance is throwing good money after bad.
- Project work, where the job is defined and finite. That is not support; that is a project, and it should be quoted fixed.
For a booking-led business with a WordPress site and no technical staff, none of those applies.
The middle option
Some studios offer a small retainer: a few hours a month at a reduced rate, use them or lose them. It is a care plan without the routine, and it has the care plan's cost with hourly's gaps. If the retainer does not include staged updates, tested backups and monitoring, it is buying availability without buying maintenance.
What to do with this
Add up what your site cost you last year, including the hours you or your staff spent on it and any emergency. If the number is under the plan and nothing broke, you may be one of the honest cases. If anything broke, or if you cannot say when the backups were last tested, the care plan is the cheaper option, and its price is the same every month, which is the point.