Free tool

WordPress care plan pricing calculator.

Enter your hours, rate and tooling cost. Get a floor price and margin for each tier. No signup, no email required.

Your numbers
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Suggested floor per tier
TierHoursYour costPriceProfit
Essential1.20$110$219/mo$110
Recommended2.00$179$357/mo$179
Premium4.40$386$771/mo$386
$3,570recurring per month at 10 sites on the Recommended tier
$42,840annualised, before any project work

These figures are derived entirely from the numbers you entered — they are not a market benchmark. The hours field is the one that decides whether the plan is profitable, so measure it rather than estimating it.

How it works

The arithmetic behind the number

The calculator applies the same two lines you would work out on paper:

  • Floor = (hours per site × effective hourly rate) + tooling cost + incident allowance
  • Price = floor ÷ (1 − target margin)

Tiers scale the hours rather than inventing separate prices: Essential assumes less hands-on time than your baseline, Premium assumes materially more, because a same-business-day response commitment and a staging workflow genuinely cost more to honour.

The number people get wrong

Hours per site. Almost everyone estimates it below what it is, because the estimate covers the planned work and forgets the unplanned: the email thread about a form, the plugin conflict, the client who wants one image swapped. Track it for a single month across a few sites before you commit to a price list.

Once you have a price, the care plan guide covers what to put in each tier and the contract wording that prevents scope disputes. If the hours figure is what is making the margin difficult, automating the recurring work is the lever that moves it.

Questions

Pricing a care plan, answered.

How much should I charge for WordPress maintenance?

There is no single correct figure, because the number that decides profitability is your own hours per site rather than the market rate. Enter your real hours, effective hourly rate and per-site tooling cost above and the calculator returns a floor price and the margin at each tier.

What is the incident allowance for?

It is the share of labour you set aside for the month a site breaks — a hack, a failed update, a host outage. Agencies that price without it look profitable until the first serious incident, which can absorb a year of margin on that client.

Why does the calculator not show industry benchmark prices?

Because a benchmark tells you what other agencies charge, not whether your plan is profitable. Two agencies charging the same monthly fee can have opposite margins depending on how much of the work is manual. Pricing from your own cost base is the more reliable method.

Should the price be per site or per client?

Per site, almost always. Clients with several sites will ask for a bundle, which is fine as a volume discount — but the underlying cost scales with sites, not with clients, so your pricing model should too.

Lower the hours, not the price.

Scheduled routines run the recurring work across every client site — and anything they do can be undone in one click.

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