Pricing guide
How much does website maintenance cost?
The difference between retainers is not the price but what the invoice actually buys.
A frequent scenario: the site launched a year ago, nobody has installed an update since, and the first piece of news arrives from a customer who finds it hacked. Maintenance exists precisely so you never get there, and the real market ranges for 2026 look like this: €50–150 a month for a brochure site, €150–500 a month for an online store, and from €500 a month upward for platforms and applications with active users. The alternative to a retainer is an hour pack, billed at an indicative €40–70 an hour, which suits situations where interventions are rare. What separates offers is not the monthly figure but the contents: some retainers mean nothing more than an automated backup, others include monitoring, security updates and a budget for small changes. Below you will see what is reasonable to receive at each tier — and the situations in which, honestly, you need no retainer at all.
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Key takeaways
Brochure site: €50–150 a month
Platform and plugin updates, regular backups, uptime monitoring and small content changes included.
Online store: €150–500 a month
Everything above, plus verification of the order and payment flow after every update — a broken checkout costs sales every hour.
Platform or application: from €500 a month
Permanent monitoring, a contractually guaranteed response time (SLA), priority security updates and user support.
Hour packs: €40–70 an hour
No retainer — you buy a block of hours and consume it as needed. Suitable for static sites that need attention a few times a year.
What maintenance covers — and what is billed separately
A fair retainer covers: updating the platform and its extensions, automated backups with a genuine, tested restore path rather than an assumed one, availability monitoring with alerting, security patches, and a defined volume of small changes — copy edited, images replaced, a new banner. Ask for the exact list and the number of included hours in the offer, otherwise full maintenance can mean anything at all.
What does NOT belong in a retainer, however generous it sounds: new functionality (a price calculator, a customer account area), redesigns, marketing campaigns and SEO work, migration to another host. Those are quoted separately, as projects. The warning sign in the other direction: if you have been paying a retainer for a year and the monthly report says only that a backup was taken, you are buying a €10 service at a €100 price.
Frequently asked questions
When do I NOT need a maintenance retainer?
When the site is static — no store, no critical forms, no customer data — and built on technology without frequent updates. In that case an hour pack consumed as needed, two or three times a year, is financially more honest than a monthly retainer paid for peace of mind.
Can I handle website maintenance myself?
One-click updates and text changes, yes, if you have the time and take a backup before every action. The problem appears with incompatibilities: a plugin update that breaks the payment page is hard to fix without a technical person, and every hour of downtime on a store means lost orders.
What happens if I drop maintenance for a few months?
The site does not stop, but it accumulates vulnerabilities: every uninstalled platform or plugin version is a publicly documented hole that bots scan for automatically. Statistically, un-updated sites are the primary target of compromises — and cleaning a hacked site often costs as much as a year of retainer.
Do unused hours from the retainer roll over?
It depends on the contract, and it is a clause worth negotiating explicitly. Practice varies: some suppliers roll hours over for a month, others not at all. If your history shows low consumption, ask either for a 2–3 month rollover or switch to a prepaid hour pack — you pay only for what you use.
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Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247