Every B2B owner we talk to has the same question once their site is live: “What do I actually need to pay for ongoing maintenance?” The answers online range from “nothing, it’s WordPress, just update plugins yourself” to “$2,000/month minimum or your site will explode.” Both are wrong for most businesses. Here’s the honest decision matrix.
The 4 tiers
Tier 1 — DIY ($0/month). You log in monthly, run updates, and fix things when they break. Works for static brochure sites under 10 pages with no forms, no e-commerce, and no real lead value. If your site is essentially a digital business card and downtime costs you nothing, this is fine. Budget 2-4 hours of your time per month, plus whatever a panicked emergency fix runs ($300-800) when something does break.
Tier 2 — Cheap ($30-80/month). Automated plugin updates run on a schedule. That’s it. No staging environment, no uptime monitoring, no form testing, no human checking whether the update broke something. If an update conflicts with your theme at 2am Tuesday, the site stays down until you notice Wednesday and call someone. You’re paying for hands-off updates and accepting the risk that the site might just be down.
Tier 3 — Real ($150-400/month). Updates run on staging first, get smoke-tested, then promoted to production. Uptime monitoring pings every 1-5 minutes. Forms get tested monthly so you know leads are actually landing in your inbox. You get 1-3 hours of fix time bundled in for the inevitable small breakages. This is the sweet spot for most B2B sites that generate leads.
Tier 4 — Premium ($500-2,000/month). Everything in Real, plus dedicated dev hours each month, conversion-rate optimization testing, content production, and an SEO retainer. Makes sense when the site is a primary revenue engine and you want a team treating it like one.
How to pick: 4 questions
- Site complexity: Static pages only, or forms/integrations/membership/e-commerce? More moving parts = higher tier.
- Downtime cost: What does one day offline actually cost you in missed leads or lost trust? Multiply by the realistic odds it happens.
- Internal capacity: Do you have someone on staff who will actually log in monthly and fix what breaks? If “I’ll get to it” is the honest answer, skip DIY.
- Lead value: If one lead is worth $5K+, a $200/month plan that prevents one lost week pays for itself 25x over.
The hidden cost of “Cheap”
Cheap-tier plans look like a deal until something breaks. There’s no staging to catch the conflict, no monitoring to alert you, no human in the loop. The $50/month savings versus Real disappears the first time you lose a week of leads. We’ve seen this play out enough times to stop being surprised.
Real example
A Bergen County contractor was on a Cheap-tier plan, $40/month. A plugin auto-update conflicted with their page builder and took the entire site down — including the contact form their leads came through. Nobody noticed for two days. It took another four days for the cheap provider to escalate, diagnose, and patch. Six days of zero leads during their busy season. Their average job was $8K. They lost an estimated 3-4 jobs. The difference between Cheap and Real over two years would have been roughly $5,000. The six days cost them more than that in a single week.
How AJD handles this
Our maintenance plans sit in the Real tier by default — staging-tested updates, uptime monitoring, monthly form tests, bundled fix hours, and a human who actually looks at the site. We’ll tell you honestly if DIY is right for your situation. We’ll also tell you when Premium makes sense. The goal is matching the plan to the actual business risk, not upselling.
Not sure which tier fits your site? Send us the URL and a sentence about what the site does for your business. We’ll tell you the honest answer — even if the answer is “you don’t need us.”
