What Should Website Maintenance Cost a Small Non-Profit?

Ask three companies what website maintenance costs and you’ll get three numbers so far apart they seem to describe different products. Sometimes they do. This is how to read the quotes.

What maintenance has to include

Whatever the price, care includes four things, and you should see all four named in writing:

• Software updates, applied and then tested. Automatic updates on their own are a coin flip nobody is watching.
• Backups that someone has restored at least once. An untested backup is a hope with a file name.
• A person who responds, with a stated expectation of how fast, especially when something is broken.
• Content help. If changing a phone number on your own website costs extra or takes three weeks, that isn’t a care plan.

What padding looks like

• Monthly reports that are auto-generated screenshots of uptime graphs nobody reads
• SEO monitoring with no changes ever made
• Hour bundles that expire, so you feel pressure to use them
• Vague security hardening line items repeated every month

How to budget for it

For a typical small non-profit site, care should be a flat, predictable line item, closer to a utility bill than a consulting engagement. It shouldn’t change month to month, it shouldn’t surprise your treasurer, and it should include the small content edits that keep a site feeling alive. That’s how my own care plans work: one flat rate, everything named, nothing padded.

My plans are $95, $149, or $249 a month, depending on how much the site changes, and paying for a year gets one month free. Those numbers are published, so you can hold any quote up against them.

The most expensive option is the $0 plan. It collects its fees later, all at once, on the worst possible day.

Paying for maintenance now and unsure what you’re getting? Send me the invoice line items and I’ll translate them for free.