Services / Care plans
06Care plans
Optional, and meant to stay that way
Most agency retainers exist because leaving is hard. This one has to earn the month.
There are two honest reasons to pay someone monthly for a website. Either you do not want to think about hosting, updates and backups — a completely reasonable position — or you make enough small changes that having someone on hand is cheaper than quoting each one.
There is a third reason the industry runs on, which is that you cannot leave. The site sits on hosting you do not control, in a system you cannot export, built by someone who kept the keys. We will not do that, which is why every site here is built handover-ready by default whether or not you take a plan.
What the plan covers
Hosting, managed. Deployment, HTTPS certificates, the CDN, and the domain renewal you would otherwise forget. One less invoice and one less password.
Updates and backups. Dependency and security updates applied, and backups you can actually restore from — which means they get tested, not just taken. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hypothesis.
Uptime monitoring. If the site stops responding we hear about it, rather than you finding out from a customer. Static sites fail rarely, which is part of why they are the default, but "rarely" is not "never" and DNS goes wrong everywhere.
A monthly allowance of small changes. Copy edits, swapped photographs, a new team member, updated hours, a published post. Unused time does not roll over — an allowance that accumulates turns into an argument eleven months later.
What is not in it
New pages and new features are quoted separately. This is deliberate: if substantial work quietly consumed the monthly allowance, the allowance would stop covering the small things it exists for, and you would be worse off than paying for both.
We will tell you when something you have asked for is bigger than the plan rather than doing a rushed version of it inside the hours.
Or take the keys
If you would rather run it yourself, that is a supported outcome and not a lesser one. The site and its repository transfer to you, we keep no deploy access, and you get the recorded walkthrough. A static site is inexpensive to host and has no database to maintain, so the ongoing burden is genuinely small.
You can also change your mind in either direction later. Moving from self-managed to a plan, or a plan to self-managed, costs nothing but the notice.
What you get monthly
Hosting, domain and certificates
Managed and renewed. One less password and one less annual surprise.
Tested backups
Taken and restored from, because an untested backup is only a hypothesis.
Monitoring that alerts us
Not you. Finding out from a customer is the expensive way.
Small changes, no ticket haggling
Send it, it gets done. Anything larger is quoted before work starts.
07Boundaries
What we don't do
- No mandatory plans. Owning your website is never conditional on paying us monthly.
- No lock-in. Cancel monthly and take everything needed to host elsewhere. Nothing is held back as leverage.
- No hostage hosting. The domain stays in your name. We manage it; we do not own it.
- No reports instead of work. A month whose only deliverable is a PDF summarising that nothing happened should not be billed.
08Questions
Asked
about care
No. It is optional and it is never a condition of owning your website. If you would rather run the site yourself, the site and its repository transfer to you at launch and we keep no access.
Copy edits, swapping images, adding a team member, updating hours or prices, publishing a post. A new page or a new feature is quoted separately rather than quietly eating the month's allowance.
Yes, monthly. On cancellation you get the site and everything needed to host it elsewhere. A care plan is a service you keep because it is useful, not because leaving is difficult.
Uptime monitoring alerts us rather than waiting for you to notice. Static sites on a CDN have very little that can fail, which is part of why they are the default — no database to corrupt, no application server to fall over.