The maintenance itself doesn’t change: updates with restore points, verified backups, uptime monitoring, someone answering when it breaks. What changes is who does it, and how provably. Four honest options:
| who does it | typical price | the catch |
|---|---|---|
| DIY with tools | $0–30/mo tooling + 1–4 hrs per site per month | The hours are yours, forever |
| Freelancer retainer | commonly ~$50–150/hr | Coverage depends on one person |
| Maintenance services | roughly $30–300+/site/mo | Identical checklists hide very different work |
| WPCloudLab | $250–990/site/mo all-in, volume discounts to −60% | Expensive — unless your hours cost something |
DIY: the tools are almost free.
If you run maintenance yourself, tooling is cheap. As of mid-2026: ManageWP’s core is free with paid add-ons around $1–2 per site per month, WP Umbrella starts at €1.99 per site, and MainWP’s core plugin is free and open-source with a Pro tier around $29 a month. All three are competent — we compare ourselves to each, honestly, at vs ManageWP, vs WP Umbrella and vs MainWP.
The real line item never appears on those invoices: your time. Done properly — updates with restore points, visual checks, a monthly restore test, link crawls, plugin audits — maintenance runs 1–4 hours per site per month. Multiply honestly. Five sites at two hours each, with your time worth $75, is $750 a month of labor attached to a $15 toolbox. The tools are cheap precisely because your hours aren’t in the price.
Freelancers: renting judgment by the hour.
Freelancer rates commonly run $50–150 an hour, with maintenance retainers typically buying two to five hours a month. A good freelancer is genuinely good: they know your site’s history, they exercise real judgment, and they do the work no dashboard can.
The structural risks are coverage and the bus factor. One person means one timezone, holidays, illness, other clients, and eventually a career change — usually announced exactly when you least want news. And coverage varies enormously with the individual: some restore-test backups religiously; many configured a backup plugin in 2023 and haven’t looked since. Two questions separate them: when did you last test a restore of my site, and what happens when you’re away?
Services: the $30–300 spread.
Productized maintenance services run roughly $30 to $300+ per site per month, and from the sales pages they look identical — updates, backups, monitoring, “peace of mind.” The spread isn’t features. It’s what happens behind the checklist, and three questions expose it:
- 01Who verifies the backups? A cron job that uploads a file is $30 behavior. Byte-level verification and scheduled restore drills are top-of-range behavior — because an unverified backup is a hope, not a deliverable.
- 02Who looks at the site after updates? The cheap end runs updates blind and waits for complaints. The top of the market compares before/after screenshots — desktop and mobile — and rolls a regression back before you hear about it.
- 03Who answers when it breaks? A ticket queue with a 48-hour SLA, or an engineer inside the hour? Downtime prices this question for you.
None of this is visible on a pricing page, which is how the market charges both $30 and $300 for what reads as the same bullet list. Ask the three questions and the tiers separate instantly.
Our place on this map.
WPCloudLab runs $250–990 per site per month, all-in — no add-on menu — with automatic volume discounts down to −60% for larger fleets. The full plan detail is on the pricing page; the short version of what those dollars buy: daily encrypted backups verified byte-for-byte with weekly restore drills, updates reviewed with before/after screenshots on desktop and mobile and rolled back on regression, uptime and visual-regression monitoring, broken-link crawls, client-ready reports — and engineers who usually answer inside the hour.
By the standards of the table above, we’re the expensive column. Deliberately: the price includes the hours, the judgment and the proof. Whether that trade makes sense is arithmetic, not loyalty.
When cheap is the right answer.
Plainly: not every site justifies $250 a month. A personal blog, a hobby project, a brochure site whose outage costs you nothing measurable — put it on a €2 tool with a weekly calendar reminder and keep your money.
Cheap works when three things are true: the site is low-stakes, someone technical owns it and will actually run the routine, and you can tolerate a day of downtime while you sort things out. If that’s you, our maintenance checklist is the whole job description — genuinely doable.
The math flips when the site makes money, when nobody wants to own the checklist, or when “a day of downtime” has a number attached. Then you’re not buying maintenance anymore; you’re buying hours and 3am judgment — from us or from anyone. Price it that way and the decision usually makes itself.