Website Care Plans: What's Worth Paying For and What Isn't
An email lands in your inbox: „we’d like to offer ongoing care for your website, PLN 199 a month”. Inside there are four bullet points: updates, backups, monitoring, technical support. It sounds sensible, because nobody wants to wake up to a dead website on a Wednesday morning. Except that a year later it adds up to PLN 2,388 and you still cannot say what was actually done in those twelve months.
The trouble with these offers is that the word „care” covers two completely different jobs, sold under one label and at a similar price. One of them may be entirely unnecessary for your site. The other is often the only reason a site has any traffic left after a year. Below I separate the two, give real price ranges, and list what should make you stop and ask questions.
Two different trades under one name
The first kind of care is technical. Somebody keeps the software from falling apart: updating plugins, patching security holes, renewing certificates, running backups, watching the hosting. That is caretaker work. When it is done well you see nothing on the site, because nothing broke.
The second kind is editorial and analytical. Somebody makes sure the site does more each month: adding articles that answer your customers’ questions, reading the numbers and saying what they mean, fixing the copy where visitors drop off. That is gardening rather than caretaking. The results are visible, but only after a quarter or so.
Most care offers on the market sell the first job and stay quiet about the second. And the second one is what decides whether you get more calls next year.
Technical care: what actually happens in it
How much work this is depends on what your site runs on. On WordPress there is plenty of it, and that is not a made-up chore. The core gets updates several times a year, plugins far more often, and every plugin is somebody else’s code with its own holes. A neglected WordPress install left alone for two years can get taken over and start sending spam, which the owner usually learns about from a customer or from the hosting company.
On a static site, meaning one built from ready HTML files served from a CDN, that list shrinks to a handful of items. There are no plugins, no database, no admin panel exposed to the internet. Nothing to patch, and very little to break into. We went through the difference between these two architectures in the post on WordPress versus a static website.
| Line item in a care plan | WordPress | Static site |
|---|---|---|
| Plugin and core updates | real monthly work | not applicable, no plugins |
| Patching security holes | real work | almost no attack surface |
| Database backups | needed | there is no database |
| SSL certificate | free and automatic today | free and automatic today |
| Uptime monitoring | useful | useful, usually part of hosting |
| Fixing a failed update | happens a few times a year | rare |
The conclusion is simple and awkward for part of the industry. If you pay PLN 200 a month for technical care of a static site, you are paying somebody to guard against failures that architecture cannot produce.
Editorial and analytical care: the part worth paying for
Now the other side, the one the offers skip. A business website left untouched since launch has no more traffic after six months than it had in month one. Not because something broke, but because nothing was added. Google ranks sites that answer more questions, and yours still answers the same five.
The work that changes this looks like this: somebody checks which phrases your site already appears for, picks the ones with real demand, writes pieces aimed at them, and a month later looks at which of those started bringing visits. On top of that comes reading the numbers and drawing a plain-language conclusion, instead of mailing the client an export from Google Analytics. Two of our posts go deeper here: what a website should do after launch and how to know if your website actually works.
This work makes sense whatever the technology. Static or not, a site will not write the next article by itself.
Red flags in a care offer
Take the offer sitting on your desk and check it against a few things.
- A paid SSL certificate as a separate line. Let’s Encrypt has been free and self-renewing for years. Charging PLN 15 a month for it is a test of how closely you read.
- „Monitoring” with no report. If the contract has no sentence about what you receive in writing and how often, monitoring means nobody checks anything until you call.
- Support hours you cannot realistically use. A „2 hours a month” package looks good until you find out unused hours expire and anything larger gets quoted separately anyway.
- Technical care for a site that does not need it. Ask directly what your site runs on and what specifically was updated last quarter. „Everything is kept current” is not an answer.
- No access to your own assets. A domain registered to the contractor and hosting on their account is not care, it is a leash. The domain should be in your name, always.
There is a mirror-image red flag too: an offer promising Google positions „guaranteed in 30 days”. Nobody controls search results well enough to promise that.
What it costs across models
Rough ranges from the Polish market, gross prices, varying by city and by the size of the site.
| Model | Scope | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Agency care contract | technical plus small fixes, sometimes a report | PLN 200-600/mo |
| Freelancer by the hour | only what you commission | PLN 100-200/h, no retainer |
| Managed hosting | server, backups, core updates | PLN 40-150/mo |
| Content and SEO separately | writing, analytics, optimisation | PLN 800-3,000/mo |
| Built into the service | depends on the provider | included in renewal |
The spread in that last column comes from the fact that the first four rows are bought separately, and each one adds its own margin. We wrote more about the entry cost itself in the post on what a business website costs.
How we handle it at Sitario
We have no separate line for technical care, because the site is static and there is nothing to patch. Hosting, certificate and backups sit in the price: the Start plan is a one-off PLN 249 including the first year of running the site, and from year two the renewal is PLN 149 a year. That is all the technical care this architecture needs, and that is what you pay for it.
Editorial and analytical care stands separately, because that is where the work is. Every week a short plain-language summary waits in your panel: how many people came, on which phrases, and what it means. Leads, phone taps and email clicks are counted from day one. The autoblog picks topics from real searches and writes articles for them, which you either approve or leave on autopilot. When the numbers point to a specific fix, you run it with one click as a request for the AI editor. Start comes with 3 requests a month; Business, a one-off PLN 399, adds 60,000 blog characters and 25 requests; and the blog add-on on its own is PLN 49 a month or PLN 69 once for a 20,000-character pool.
When you do not need a care plan at all
Honestly, there are situations where no retainer holds up.
You have a static site, one contact page and no ambitions in Google, because customers come by referral. Then you need hosting and a domain, nothing else. Or you run a seasonal business that trades four months a year and the site just has to sit there for the rest. Then paying by the hour before the season starts beats twelve monthly invoices.
The opposite case exists as well: a WordPress site with booking, payment and newsletter plugins, and nobody technical on the team. There, technical care at PLN 200-300 a month is cheaper than one outage in high season.
What to do with the offer you have
Take the quote you were sent and split it into two columns. In the first put the technical items, in the second the ones that add something: writing, reports, fixes that follow from the numbers. Then check what your site runs on. If it is static, the first column should cost very little or be part of hosting. If the second column is empty, you are paying to preserve the status quo rather than to grow.
One last thing to check in the contract, whatever the model: whether you can take your domain and your site files and walk away at any point. If you can, the most you risk is one month’s fee. If you cannot, the word „care” is being used very loosely in that offer.