What monthly care actually covers

A care plan is what keeps a site working after launch. Mine run month to month, start at $69, and are sorted by one thing: how much of my time is included.

What people are really buying

Nobody wakes up wanting backup snapshots. What an owner wants is simpler: my site is watched, it’s backed up, it keeps working, and I can see proof. The report is the product. Everything else is what makes the report true.

Why the tiers are sorted by time

My first care tiers were sorted by features, and the cheapest one left out backups. But I’d never let a client’s site go without backups, so I was charging for a difference that didn’t exist. Sooner or later a client figures that out.

The real leak was somewhere else. Someone texts about a small problem. It gets fixed in twenty minutes and never billed, because sending an invoice for twenty minutes feels petty. Across every site I look after, that adds up to a lot of donated time.

So the site plans now sell exactly that: how much hands-on time is included before the meter starts.

The site plans

Hosted, $69 a month. For a site that needs to be safe and fast and nothing else. It’s served from a global network instead of a single server, with no login page and no database to break into. It’s watched around the clock, with alerts before you’d notice anything. Every backup is restored to prove it works. The certificate, the domain and updates are handled, and page speed is measured on a phone.

Cared For, $129 a month. Everything in Hosted, plus priority support, a health pass every quarter, and the things Google needs to find you kept current. It’s the default plan.

Growth, $299 a month. Everything in Cared For, plus a monthly batch of edits, up to two hours, active SEO work, and your Google Business Profile managed: posts, review replies and photos. It’s for a site that changes often. One list a month, no rollover, and new pages are quoted separately.

All three are month to month, with 30 days notice to stop. Pay for the year and one month is free.

Sites that take orders

A site with a cart, a checkout or paid bookings goes on a store plan. A store is never put on a site plan, because the thing that matters most is different: it has to keep taking orders.

Store is $299 a month for up to 10 products. On top of everything in Cared For, checkout and payments are checked every day, order emails are checked so customers get their receipts, and shipping and tax settings are kept current. There’s one batch of product and price updates a month, up to an hour, and same-day response when orders are affected. Store Plus, $499, adds more edit time, SEO on product pages, your Google Business Profile managed and a quarterly store review. A bigger shop with more than 10 products or marketplace feeds is Store Scale, $799.

What the report will and won’t say

The report is phrased as outcomes, not tasks. It answers one question: what could have gone wrong, and didn’t. A certificate renewed before it expired. A restore test that passed. A flaw patched the week it went public.

It’s built from real monitoring data, so it can’t claim more than happened. Uptime is only reported over the time the site has actually been monitored, and the report prints when that started. It never borrows history it doesn’t have. I read every report before it goes out. None of them are sent automatically.

There’s one more honesty rule behind the plans: I don’t sell a line that isn’t live yet. If a check hasn’t been built, it isn’t on the plan.

One ladder, no bargaining

There’s no discount rung. A site is on a plan, or it’s something I’ve chosen to do as a gift, and that’s named as a gift. A fourth, cheaper price would just invite everyone else to negotiate down, and the ladder only holds if nobody bargains with it.

If you’re not sure which plan fits, the rule of thumb is short. Nobody touches the site: Hosted. You want it watched and kept current: Cared For. It changes often or you want SEO moving: Growth. It takes orders: a store plan.