How to price a care plan when hosting is included

A café owner pays her web designer one amount each month. She thinks of it as "the website". Then her card expires, the payment fails, and she asks a fair question: if she stops paying, does the site go dark? Her designer isn't sure either. The hosting sits in his account, the domain is in hers, and the care plan he sent last year says "hosting and updates included" without a word about what either costs or what happens at the end.

A care plan can include hosting. Plenty of local businesses would rather pay one monthly bill than manage a hosting account they'll never open. To price it well, split the price into three parts you can name: what the hosting costs you, what your care work is worth, and a margin for the bad months. Then write down what happens to the site if the plan ends. The rest of this guide shows how.

Should a care plan include hosting?

Hosting is the space where the website lives. A care plan is the work of looking after it. They're different things, and the choice to bundle them is a business decision, not a technical one.

Here's how the two common setups compare:

	Hosting inside your care plan	Client pays for their own hosting
What the client sees	One monthly bill, one person to call	Two bills, and a login they may lose
What you control	The server, the backups, the renewals	Only what the client gives you access to
Your risk	You pay the host even if the client pays late	Their card expires and the site goes down
Leaving	You hand over a copy of the site	They already hold the account
Best for	Small sites you look after closely	Larger sites, or clients with their own IT help

Neither is wrong. What goes wrong is leaving the choice unwritten. If you haven't settled what a website care plan should include, start there, then decide whether hosting belongs in it.

One line stays the same in both setups: the domain belongs in the client's name, on the client's bill. It's the address their customers, printed menus and old emails point to. Hosting can move. A domain in the wrong name is much harder to untangle.

What does hosting actually cost you?

Before you set a price, list every cost that exists because this client's site exists. For a small site it's usually a short list:

• The hosting itself. For a simple site made of ordinary files, some hosts have a free plan: Cloudflare Pages, for example, has a free plan and publishes its limits on builds and files, so you can check whether a small site fits. A WordPress site needs a paid hosting plan that runs its software.
• Backups. Storage for copies of the site, if your host doesn't include it.
• Paid add-ons. A form service, a booking tool or a premium plugin that you pay for.
• The security certificate. The padlock in the browser. Free certificates from Let's Encrypt are common, and most hosts renew them automatically. Let's Encrypt announced in December 2025 that it will shorten its certificates from 90 days to 45 days in stages by 2028. The certificate itself costs nothing, but checking that renewals work is part of your routine. The 45-day SSL certificate changes explain what that means for a care plan.
• Your share of shared tools. A monitoring tool that checks every client's site, split across the clients it covers.

Leave out the domain and the business email. Those should be the client's own accounts.

Some of these costs are small or even free today. Write them down anyway. A free plan can change, and a site can outgrow it. If you've listed the cost, you'll notice when it moves.

How do you price a care plan with hosting included?

Build the price from three lines, in this order.

1. Costs. Add up the list above for this site. Round up.
2. Time. Your monthly routine (backups, updates, checks, the short monthly note) plus the small changes the plan promises. Estimate it for a normal month, then multiply by your hourly rate.
3. Margin. Something breaks every few months: an update fails, a form stops sending, the host has a bad day. The margin pays for that time, so a bad month doesn't come out of your pocket.

Add the three and round to a price you can say in one sentence. Then test it by asking two questions. Would you still be glad to do this work in a month when two things break? Could you explain each part if the client asked?

Resist pricing from someone else's list. Care plan prices vary so widely that a number copied from another agency tells you little about your own costs and time.

If you offer more than one level, keep hosting the same in each and change the care: how many small changes, how fast you reply, how often you report. Clients understand "more help each month". They rarely understand "better hosting". A service recipe is a simple way to write each level down so you deliver it the same way every month.

What if hosting costs change?

They will, sooner or later. A host changes its plans, a site gets busier, or a free tier stops covering what the site needs. Put three sentences in the plan now, while nobody is upset:

• Yearly review. "We review the price once a year and tell you about any change 30 days before it applies."
• Growth. "If the site needs a bigger hosting plan because it has grown, we'll quote the difference before we move it."
• Extras. "New tools or add-ons you ask for are quoted separately."

This keeps you from absorbing costs you didn't choose, and it keeps the client from being surprised by a bill. It also answers the question clients rarely ask out loud: will this price creep up without warning?

What happens to hosting when the client leaves?

This is the part most care plans skip, and it's the part that decides whether a client trusts the plan enough to sign.

Write down four things:

1. Notice. How much notice either side gives. A month is common.
2. A copy of the site. What the client gets when they leave: the site files, a database export if there is one, and any images and text they supplied.
3. A handover window. How long you'll keep the site running after notice so they can move it, and whether you'll help with the move (and whether that help is quoted).
4. What stays in their name. The domain, business email, Google listing and payment accounts should never have been yours to hand back.

A café owner who reads that section knows her site won't vanish the day she stops paying. That's worth more to her than any feature in the plan.

How do you explain the price to a client?

Keep it short and concrete. Clients don't need your spreadsheet. They need to know what they're paying for and what's extra.

A plain version might read:

Your plan covers hosting for your website, monthly backups and updates, a check that your forms and booking link still work, up to three small changes a month, and a short note each month on what we did. Your domain and email stay in your name. Anything new, like a page or a booking system, gets a quote before we start.

Then put the price, the billing date and the notice period underneath.

If a client asks whether the plan is a retainer, the answer is usually no. A care plan is a fixed list of work for a fixed price. A retainer buys a block of your time. The difference between website maintenance vs a retainer matters when you price each one, so don't let one quietly become the other.

Where should the plan and its costs live?

Somewhere you'll see them when a request arrives. The price, what's included, the hosting cost you worked out and the renewal dates belong next to the client, not in an email from last spring. When the café asks for a gift card page, you want to see in a glance that it's extra. When a quote goes out, it should use the same prices you set here, and quotes, deposits and payments in one place make that easier to keep straight.

If you're deciding what else to offer once a site is live, the services you can sell after the website include care plans with and without hosting.

Whatever your AI agency chooses, keep the three lines: costs, time and margin. Write down how a client leaves, and keep the domain in their name.