Planning / 5 min read
What does website maintenance cost?
Separate platform bills, routine website care and new improvement work. Compare current studio plans and build a maintenance budget with a downloadable worksheet.
Budget for three different jobs
Website maintenance cost depends on who operates the platform, who checks the customer journey and who makes changes. Start with three lines: provider bills, routine care and improvement work. A low hosting bill can be perfectly sensible, but it does not tell you whether anyone checks your form or updates your opening hours.
- Provider bills keep accounts and tools available: domain renewal, hosting, business email and any paid booking or newsletter service.
- Routine care checks the website and makes small updates within a stated allowance. Ask who notices an outage and who follows it up.
- Improvement work changes the content or experience: a clearer service page, an article or a better inquiry journey. Budget this separately when the care plan does not include it.
A static brochure site, a CMS with several editors and a store have different moving parts. Write down the actual tools before comparing monthly fees.
A platform subscription is only one line
As checked October 17, 2026, Webflow’s published pricing lists its Basic site plan at $15 USD per month when billed yearly: $180 for twelve months, plus applicable taxes. It is a plan for a site without a CMS. That is a platform price, not a quote for writing, design, monthly edits or an independent maintenance service. Confirm the current plan and checkout terms before buying.
Put every vendor on the same twelve-month basis. Note which price is introductory, whether renewal changes it, and whether a quoted “monthly” figure requires annual payment. Domain, email, extra seats and usage charges can be separate. Record unknown costs as unknown until the provider is selected.
What the studio’s monthly plans pay for
| Plan | Monthly price | Work included |
|---|---|---|
| Keep Running | $150 | One related small-change batch, availability/SSL monitoring, a focused monthly site/form/known-workflow check, quarterly reassessment and a dated receipt. |
| Improve | $400 | Keep Running plus one agreed improvement priority, deeper review and a 20-minute conversation or equivalent asynchronous review. |
| Grow | $800 | Keep Running plus two priorities delivered in sequence, focused research and a 30-minute strategy conversation or equivalent asynchronous review. |
These are studio service fees. You own and pay for hosting, domains and paid tools directly. Monthly service is optional. An improvement priority uses the allowance for a defined task; it does not include every kind of work at once. See the full plan scope and billing choices and terms.
Work out the first-year service budget
For an eligible existing site with no usable baseline, twelve monthly Keep Running cycles would total $1,800. Add the $399 one-time baseline and the studio-service total is $2,199, before provider bills and applicable taxes. This example uses monthly billing for twelve cycles, not annual prepayment.
A new paid studio build or an already usable Audit & Fix Sprint includes the baseline; it is not charged again. Work bundled into a build is not resold as an overlapping monthly task. Start recurring service when there is distinct work to do.
Download the maintenance budget worksheet. Add your owner, result and evidence to each row. The sheet includes its source and review date.
List the renewal date, billing owner, cost, included work and evidence of the last check. A list of subscriptions is not a maintenance record.
Ask what gets checked and how recovery works
- Does the public domain load over HTTPS, and is the certificate valid? Record the date and the person who follows up on an alert.
- Can a permitted test inquiry be submitted, found at its receiving destination and replied to? A green form message alone is not enough.
- Which CMS, plugins and external tools need updates, and who tests the affected pages afterward? A static site may have a different update process.
- What is backed up: files, content, database and settings? Can an authorized person restore a copy away from the live site?
- Who owns Search Console, domain recovery and vendor billing? Check access before the only administrator leaves.
WordPress’s backup guidance distinguishes database and file backups. Other platforms have different export and recovery limits; confirm yours. A successful export is useful evidence, but a recovery test establishes whether the site can actually be restored.
These are questions for the maintenance agreement. They do not add backup, incident response or arbitrary plugin repair to a studio plan.
Choose a plan from the work waiting
If the site works and you can own its checks, you may only need provider subscriptions and occasional help. If small updates and routine checks are repeatedly missed, care may fit. Choose an improvement plan when you have content or customer-journey work ready to approve; choose a finite review when the cause of a problem is still unclear.
