Most agencies live on projects. You build a site, invoice, and then it goes quiet until the next job. Cash flow lurches and every month starts from zero. A care plan – a fixed monthly fee for keeping a client’s site healthy – is the most natural recurring revenue an agency has, because it packages work you already do. This guide covers what to put in it, how to price it, and where monitoring and diagnosis fit.
What a care plan actually promises
Strip away the marketing and a care plan promises three things: the site stays up, it stays current and secure, and when something breaks, someone competent is already on it. The building blocks behind that promise:
- Updates – core, themes and plugins kept current, with a way back when an update breaks something.
- Backups – restorable and test-restored now and then, not just “configured”.
- Security – basic hardening, a check of installed plugins against known vulnerabilities, and a plan for the bad day.
- Monitoring and diagnosis – you know the site is down, slow or throwing errors before the client does, and you know where to look.
The first three are invisible to the client when they work. Monitoring is what makes the plan visible: the e-mail that says “we saw the checkout fail at 06:12 and it was working again by 06:40” is what renews the contract.
Price the outcome, not the hours
A plan priced by the hour invites the client to count hours – and a quiet month looks like money for nothing. Price the outcome instead: a site that is up and maintained, and a response time for when it isn’t. Most agencies end up with two or three tiers that differ by what is at stake, not by how much work goes in:
- Brochure site – monthly updates, backups, uptime and certificate monitoring, e-mail alerts.
- Business site – the above plus faster response, monitoring of key pages and forms, and a monthly report.
- Shop – the above plus checkout monitoring, out-of-hours alerting and an agreed response time.
Know your cost per site
The margin is the gap between what one site costs you per month and what the plan brings in. List every tool with a per-site cost – hosting if you resell it, backup storage, security, monitoring – and your realistic time per month, including the occasional bad update. Then add a buffer for incidents: one serious outage a year on a shop can eat several months of margin if you priced it like a brochure site.
The encouraging part is how it scales. Tool costs per site usually fall with volume while your price stays put, and routine work gets faster once every site runs the same stack. Ten plans are a side income; fifty are a predictable line in the books that doesn’t depend on winning a new project every month.
Make the value visible every month
Clients cancel plans they can’t see. Build the evidence in from the start:
- A monthly report with uptime, response times, incidents and what you updated.
- A status page the client can check themselves – it saves you the “is it down?” phone call.
- Honest incident notes: what happened, when you noticed, what you did. Say what an outage was correlated with; don’t claim a cause you haven’t confirmed.
Sell it under your own name
If reports and alerts arrive from a tool the client has never heard of, they start wondering what they are paying you for. When they come from your agency, you are the provider, not a middleman. What matters in practice is that everything the client sees carries your brand: the reports, the status page, the alert e-mails and – on WordPress – the plugin in their own admin.
Where Ravnsight fits
Ravnsight covers the monitoring and diagnosis part of the plan. Agency plans gather every client site in one overview, with a client register, an encrypted login vault and per-client alerts. A failed check is confirmed from a second country before anyone is alerted, so the on-call phone only rings for real problems. With the Detective plugin on a WordPress site, an outage is shown next to what changed right before it – an update, a new PHP error – so the diagnosis starts with a lead. Pro also lets you run updates with rollback and on-site backups from the platform; nothing is changed on a client’s site unless you start it.
The Partner plan adds white-label: your logo and colours on reports and status pages, alert and report e-mail from your own sender address, embeddable status widgets for your clients’ sites, a branded build of the Detective plugin, and your own pricing – the client never sees ours.
Start small
You don’t need the perfect plan on day one. Offer it to the clients you already look after informally, at a fixed monthly price, and add monitoring so the value shows from the first month. Once you can see the real cost per site, formalise the tiers and offer them to new clients. There is a bonus beyond the revenue: the client whose site you look after every month is the one who calls you first when it’s time for the next rebuild.
