Search for WordPress maintenance pricing and you will find plans at $27 a month and plans at $400 a month, both described as "complete care." That spread is not random. The bands map to genuinely different levels of service, and once you know what each one includes, the market stops looking confusing.
The four price bands
$20 to $40 a month. Automated updates pushed straight to your live site, basic backups, a scan. No staging, no testing before updates go live, no named human. This is software with a subscription attached. It is genuinely better than nothing, and it is the band where a failed update becomes your problem at 3am.
$40 to $80 a month. Managed backups, monthly tested updates, basic security, uptime monitoring, email support with a response window. Reasonable coverage for a site that matters but does not take payments.
$80 to $200 a month. The mid-market. Staging, more frequent updates, performance monitoring and optimisation work, real security hardening rather than just scanning, faster response commitments. This is where sites that generate revenue should sit.
$200 to $500 and up. A dedicated point of contact, emergency response with an hour-scale SLA, proactive reviews rather than reactive fixes. You are paying for someone to answer fast at the worst moment, which only makes sense if that moment is expensive.
For reference: freelancers typically charge $50 to $150 a month, agencies $150 to $500 and up, and one-off emergency fixes run anywhere from $150 to $2,000 per incident.
How to work out your band
Skip the feature comparison for a moment and do this arithmetic instead.
Take your monthly revenue that depends on the site. Divide by 730. That is roughly what an hour of downtime costs you.
If the answer is a few dollars, you are in the lower bands and that is a perfectly sensible place to be. If the answer is $40, then a single eight-hour outage costs $320, and a $99 plan pays for itself if it prevents one incident every three months. If the answer is $200 an hour, you should be buying the fastest response you can and not thinking hard about the monthly difference.
The fix: price maintenance against the cost of one bad day, not against the cost of nothing going wrong. Nothing going wrong is not the scenario you are insuring.
Watch how you are billed, not just how much
The headline price is not always the price. Two things to check.
Metered billing. Some hosts charge overage per visit above your plan allowance, and count bot and crawler traffic as visits. WP Engine bills roughly $2 per 1,000 visits over plan, which means a crawler-heavy month can produce an invoice that looks nothing like the pricing page. Flat pricing costs more on paper and less in surprises.
Unbundled essentials. On some entry tiers, backups and SSL are add-ons rather than inclusions. Add $20 a month for those and the cheap plan is not cheap.
Also check the term. A plan with a three-month minimum or an annual lock is priced differently from one you can leave next month, whatever the number says.
What Up Speed costs, plainly
Three plans, priced per site. One plan covers one website.
- Starter, $99 a month. Core, theme and plugin updates tested before they go live, scheduled off-site backups around four times a month with 30-day retention and one-click restore, malware scanning, 24/7 uptime monitoring on 60-second checks, a plain-English monthly report, and real human email support within 48 hours.
- Professional, $249 a month. Everything above, plus Wordfence firewall, iThemes hardening and two-factor login, Google PageSpeed performance work, a staging environment, blacklist and broken-link monitoring, traffic reporting, and 24-hour priority response.
- Premium, $499 a month. Everything above, plus a 1-hour emergency response SLA, a dedicated point of contact who knows your site, and quarterly proactive health reviews.
Annual billing saves 17%, about two months free. No contracts, cancel anytime. Migration is free with any plan.
What is not maintenance: new features, design changes and integrations are custom development, billed at $120 an hour rather than folded into the monthly fee. We would rather say that clearly than let "unlimited edits" turn into a queue you never get to the front of.
What you are actually buying at the top of the range
The honest answer is response, and coverage of the things your host excludes.
A host's uptime SLA covers the server only, with application errors, plugin conflicts and theme code excluded by name. Ours is a care SLA: plugin and theme conflicts, malware, failed updates and performance regressions are covered work. Uptime is 99.9%, about 8.7 hours a year at the outside, with a service credit if we breach it in a billing month. If your site breaks, the job is to fix it, not to alert you.
Most sites that make money belong in the mid band, which is the Professional plan at $249 per site per month. If you are not sure whether you are over-paying or under-covered right now, start with the free site audit. No credit card, no trial to forget to cancel, just a look at the actual state of your site before you spend anything.