Care plans
WordPress care plans: what to include, what to charge, and when software pays for itself
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A WordPress care plan is a monthly subscription a studio sells to a client it built a site for: updates, backups, monitoring and a human to call when something breaks. It is the one revenue line in a web studio that does not need a new sale every month, which is why most of the educators in the space teach it first.
This guide covers what belongs in a plan, what studios charge, and the arithmetic of how many sites you need before a tool for running them makes sense.
What a care plan should include
- Updates with a backup first. Core, plugin and theme updates on a schedule, each run backed up and logged so "what changed last Tuesday?" has an answer.
- Uptime, SSL and domain monitoring. You hear about the outage before the client does. See uptime monitoring for agencies.
- A monthly report. Uptime, updates performed and an SEO trend. This is the part clients remember when the renewal comes round, and the answer to "what am I paying for?"
- A small amount of changes. Name a number of edits or minutes. Unlimited edits turns a care plan into a dev retainer.
- A place to ask. A request form or client portal beats a text message at 9pm.
Leave out hosting resale, ad management and anything you cannot deliver in the same month you promise it.
What studios charge
Published care plans run roughly $69 to $359 a month (Topsyde's pricing guide). In MainWP's web care survey, 57% of providers charged $25 to $100 and 33% charged $100 to $200. Two small studios whose public pricing pages we checked on 2026-10-06 show the spread: one sells $99 / $199 / $349 with uptime in every tier and monthly reports on the top two, the other runs $120 to $600 with hours-based upper tiers.
Three tiers is the most common packaging in that survey. Price per site, not per hour, so the plan scales with the number of sites you keep alive and not with your calendar.
When software pays for itself
Software for running care plans is a cost against care-plan revenue. The table assumes $125 a site per month, a figure inside the range above, and uses the cheapest Bluprent plan that holds that many sites. Change the assumption in your head: if you charge $200 a site, halve every percentage.
| Care-plan sites | Monthly care revenue | Bluprent plan | Plan price | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | $375 | Free | $0 | 0% |
| 8 | $1,000 | Solo | $149/mo | 15% |
| 15 | $1,875 | Studio | $349/mo | 19% |
| 25 | $3,125 | Studio | $349/mo | 11% |
| 40 | $5,000 | Studio | $349/mo | 7% |
| 100 | $12,500 | Concierge | $749/mo | 6% |
Below roughly 6 paying care-plan sites, a paid tool costs more than it saves, which is why Bluprent's Free plan covers 3 websites with no card. From 25 to 40 sites the share is 7% to 11%. It is highest just past a plan limit, as the 15-site row shows. In that 8 to 40 range, replacing a separate CRM, monitor, report builder and portal can make up much of the difference. Above 100 sites you have a team and a process, and the conversation is different.
Per-site tools look cheaper on paper, and for pure site management they are. The comparison that matters is the whole stack. See the honest numbers against ManageWP and MainWP.
Running the book
Once you have a dozen plans, the work is not the updates. It is knowing which client is on which plan, which site had an incident this month, which invoice is overdue and what to say in the report. That is a CRM problem, specifically a CRM for website maintenance. Start on the Free plan or get your own care-plan number.