The Care Plan is the part of our pricing people ask the most careful questions about, and that's fair — "optional monthly fee" is exactly the phrase that precedes a lot of bad software subscriptions. So here's the honest version: what it actually includes, what it costs to do yourself instead, and when skipping it makes sense.
What's actually in it
Every tier's Care Plan covers the same core four things, scaled up by tier:
- →Hosting, SSL, and uptime monitoring. Your site stays online, on a fast host, with a valid security certificate — checked, not assumed.
- →Security and platform updates. The unglamorous work that keeps a site from being the one that gets defaced or blacklisted by Google after a plugin exploit nobody patched.
- →Content updates. 1/month on Starter, 2/month on Growth, unlimited small updates on Premium — new hours, a price change, a seasonal announcement, without you touching code.
- →Support. 48-hour response on Starter, 24-hour on Growth, same-business-day on Premium — a real person, not a ticket queue.
What it costs to skip it
Nothing is stopping you from managing hosting, security patches, and content edits yourself — plenty of technically-inclined owners do. The honest cost isn't money, it's time and risk:
- →Comparison-shopping and configuring hosting yourself: a few hours upfront, then ongoing renewal/monitoring you have to remember to do.
- →Applying security updates: low effort per update, but skipped updates are exactly how small business sites get compromised — it's not a hypothetical risk, it's the most common way a site actually goes down.
- →Every content change becomes either a support ticket to whoever built your site (billed hourly, usually $75-150/hr) or something you learn to do yourself in code you didn't write.
Run the math on your own hourly rate against $39-$179/month and the answer is usually obvious — but it genuinely depends on how comfortable you are in a hosting dashboard, and there's no wrong answer for a business that would rather do it themselves.
The part that actually matters: it's never a trap
The setup fee is a one-time payment for the build. Once it's paid, the site and its code are 100% yours — no license fee, no "your site gets deactivated if you stop paying us" clause some platforms bury in the fine print. The Care Plan is genuinely optional, month-to-month, cancel with 30 days notice, no penalty. If you cancel, your site keeps running — you (or whoever you choose) just take over hosting and updates from there.
That's a deliberate structural choice, not a marketing line — see the full breakdown of how ownership and cancellation actually work.
Still deciding which tier fits?
See the full pricing breakdown, or just ask — no pressure, no obligation.