Month to month. You own the code. Leave whenever you like.
Before anything about what it costs, here is what you are not agreeing to. There is no contract, no minimum term and no cancellation fee, and the website is yours whether you stay or go.
What you are not agreeing to
Month to month
Cancel any month, in an email, with no notice period. There is no contract to get out of and no cancellation fee. If you cancel in month two, month two is the last one you pay for.
You own the source code
Leave whenever you want and I'll help you move the site to another host or another developer, at no charge. Not a zip file and good luck. I'll actually help you land it.
The site is yours
The plan pays for hosting and for my time. It does not buy you permission to use your own website. You paid for the design and the code, and you keep them either way.
What $79 a month actually gets you
What each one actually means for you, rather than a list of feature names.
An admin panel
A private dashboard for your site. Write and publish blog posts, edit the text on any page and swap out photos yourself, without emailing me and without touching a line of code. You log in, you change the thing, it's live.
Site analytics, in that same panel
What people actually did on your site: which pages they opened, where they arrived from, and what they clicked. No second login and no separate tool to learn.
Heat maps
A picture of where visitors click and how far down each page they scroll. It is the fastest way to find out that the thing you were most proud of is below the point where everybody stops reading.
Drag-and-drop editing
A visual editor for your own content, included at no extra cost, for when you would rather move something yourself than describe the change to me. It edits your content inside the custom site I built for you. It is not a template builder and it does not replace the hand-written code your site is made of, so it stays just as fast whichever way you edit it.
24/7 monitoring
Your site is checked continuously, day and night. If it goes down I find out before you do, and by the time you would have noticed I am usually already fixing it.
Free small edits
Anything that takes me ten minutes or less is free, as often as you need it: a phone number, new opening hours, a price change, swapping a photo. Larger changes come out of your three included hours, and anything past that is quoted at $40/hour before I start. I will always tell you which bucket a request falls into before I do it.
Hosting, your domain, security certificate renewals, backups and security updates sit under all of that. They are the boring part, and the reason the plan exists at all.
Staying costs less than the hours it contains
of my time each month
my ordinary hourly rate
before hosting is counted at all
The plan is $79. The time inside it is worth $120 at the same rate I charge everyone else, so the hosting, the backups, the monitoring and the admin panel come out of the difference. It is a discount for staying, not a fee for being stuck.
What these cost when you buy them one at a time
Ranges, not specific competitor prices, because published prices move and most of these tools charge by traffic or by seat. Check them yourself before you take my word for it.
| What you'd be buying | Roughly, on its own | In the care plan |
|---|---|---|
| Website builder or hosting subscription | $15-$50 a month | Included |
| An analytics tool worth logging into | Free to $20 a month | Included |
| Heat maps and scroll tracking | $0 on a tiny plan, $30-$100 a month once you have traffic | Included |
| Uptime monitoring | Free to $20 a month | Included |
| A developer for the small changes | $40-$150 an hour, with a minimum on most invoices | Ten-minute jobs free, then 3 hours a month |
| Someone who already knows how your site is built | Not something you can buy on its own | Me |
You can absolutely assemble all of this yourself for less than $79, and if you enjoy that sort of thing you should. What you cannot buy in the stack is the last row, and in practice that is the row that decides whether the small stuff ever actually gets done.
The things people ask about the plan
What if I want to leave?
You keep everything: the source code, your content, your domain and your photos. Tell me you're going and I'll help you move it to another host or another developer at no charge, because a handover that goes badly is a worse advert for me than losing the work. There is no exit fee and no notice period. The one thing to plan around is timing: the site comes off my hosting when the plan stops, so we line the move up first.
What if I don't need any edits this month?
Then you don't use them. Unused hours don't roll over into next month, and I'd rather say that plainly than let you find out later. If a quiet month turns into a quiet year, cancel. You can start the plan again whenever you want, and nothing is lost in between.
Do I have to use the admin panel?
No. Plenty of owners never log in once, and that's a perfectly normal way to use the plan. Email me the change instead and I'll make it. The panel is there for people who would rather not wait on me for a typo.
Can I do both?
Yes, and that is the point of it. Most people end up doing their own small text edits and photo swaps in the panel, and sending me anything that involves a new page, a new section or something that has to be built. Neither one costs you the other.
Is the care plan required?
No. If you'd rather not have a monthly cost, say so before we start and I'll quote the build on its own and hand you the source code. Hosting, updates and monitoring become your job at that point, which suits some people fine.
What counts as a ten-minute job?
A phone number, opening hours, a price, a name, swapping one photo for another, adding a link. If you're not sure, send it and ask. I'll tell you which bucket it falls into before I start, and I don't quietly bill against your hours without saying so.
Add it, or don't.
The plan is optional on every build I do. If you want it, say so when you get your quote and it starts the month the site goes live.