Website Care Plan

What does the Website Care Plan include?

The plan covers the four things a website needs after launch and that most owners would rather not think about: somewhere reliable to run, updates applied before they become security problems, someone watching for outages, and small changes made when the business changes.

Hosting comes with SSL certificate renewal, backups and uptime monitoring. When the site goes down, we find out before you do and respond. Framework and dependency updates are applied on a regular cycle and, critically, run through the automated test suite before they reach production. A great deal of website maintenance in the market consists of clicking an update button and hoping. Here the update is a change like any other: it is tested, and if it breaks the enquiry form or removes the structured data, it does not ship.

Security is treated the same way. Patches are applied as they are released, access is reviewed, and any service the site depends on is kept on a supported version.

Page updates are the visible part of the work. The $180 + GST plan includes three a month and the $250 + GST plan includes five, so the allowance is a number you agreed to rather than a matter of goodwill. You provide the content: the new prices, the staff profile, the changed phone number, the photos, the rewritten paragraph. We apply it, test it and publish it, and one page changed counts as one update however much changes on it. Updates beyond the plan are $100 per page + GST. Anything that needs design or new functionality is quoted separately, and we say so before starting.

At the end of each month you receive a short summary of what was updated, what was fixed and what was changed, so the plan is never a fee for something invisible.

Why is it more than hosting?

Commodity hosting is cheap because it includes nothing but a server. The care plan is priced from $180 a month + GST because it includes work, and the work is what keeps the site worth what you paid for it.

A site built with structured data on every page and a deliberate crawler policy only keeps that value if updates do not erode it. A framework upgrade that silently drops a schema block, a form plugin update that breaks submissions, a certificate that lapses on a weekend: each of these is routine on an unmaintained site and each costs more to discover than to prevent. The Launch Website Build ships with a test suite for exactly this reason, and the care plan is the ongoing commitment to run it.

Where a site depends on a connected system, such as a booking tool or a CRM receiving enquiries, the care plan keeps the site side working. The connection itself, its authentication, its error handling and what happens when the other system changes its API, is the province of the integration support retainer, which is structured the same way: a monthly fee, named inclusions and no lock-in.

What are the terms?

There is no minimum term. The plan runs month to month from the first month and you can cancel in any month. The ownership position is the same as on every other service we offer: the domain is registered to you, the code is in a repository you own, the hosting and analytics accounts are in your name, and the content is yours. Cancelling means we remove our access. The site does not go dark, nothing is withheld, and any developer can pick up where we left off from the handover documentation and the test suite.

Any hosting or third-party fee that passes through at cost is named in the plan before it starts, so the monthly figure you see is the monthly figure you pay.

What does the care plan not cover?

It does not cover search performance. Keeping a site running is not the same as making it rank or making AI engines cite it, and bundling the two would make both worse. Rankings, AI visibility tracking, content and technical SEO implementation belong to the SEO and AI readiness retainers, which start with an audit. The Signal retainer is the natural pairing for a care plan client who wants to know whether the site is being found: it runs a monthly AI visibility test across four engines, monitors technical health and reports from Search Console and GA4 for $1,200 a month + GST, with named hours and an audit first.

It also does not cover project-sized work. A performance problem across every template is a Core Web Vitals remediation project. A new page set, a redesign or a new integration is quoted on its own, and so is a Shopify store build, which the care plan then looks after in the same way it looks after a launch build. A Trade Website Package or Premium Website Package site is hosted at $50 a month + GST with no changes included; the care plan is the arrangement for a package client who changes pages every month. The line is drawn where it is so that the care plan can stay at its price and you always know which work is included and which is not.

How do you start?

If we built your site, the care plan can start the month it launches.