The maintenance pricing problem
Your client's site is live. They ask: 'How much for maintenance?' You quote 200 EUR/month. They ask: 'What does that include?'
If your answer is vague ('updates, security, monitoring...'), the client feels like they're paying for nothing. They'll push back on the price or cancel after 3 months.
The fix: make your maintenance offer tangible. Monitoring is the easiest component to make visible.
Structuring your maintenance offer
A solid maintenance offer has three tiers:
Basic (100-200 EUR/month)
- Uptime monitoring (3-minute checks)
- Email alerts
- Monthly uptime report
- CMS updates
Standard (200-400 EUR/month)
- Everything in Basic
- 1-minute checks
- Branded status page on client's domain
- Client portal access
- Priority response to downtime
Premium (400-800 EUR/month)
- Everything in Standard
- 30-second checks
- SSL and performance monitoring
- Quarterly performance review
- SLA guarantee (99.9% uptime response)
The key: each tier adds visible deliverables. The client sees the status page, uses the portal, receives the reports. They understand what they're paying for.
Adding an SLA guarantee
An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a commitment to respond to incidents within a defined timeframe. It's not a guarantee that the site will never go down — it's a guarantee that you'll respond fast when it does.
Example SLA tiers:
- Basic: Response within 4 hours during business hours
- Standard: Response within 1 hour during business hours
- Premium: Response within 30 minutes, 24/7
Your monitoring tool is the backbone of your SLA. It detects the issue, alerts your team, and provides the data to prove your response time.
Pro tip: use incident timestamps from your monitoring tool to document compliance. This builds trust and justifies premium pricing.
Making it visible with reports
The secret to keeping maintenance clients long-term: make the value visible every month.
- Branded status pages — the client sees their site status 24/7
- Client portal — they check uptime anytime, no questions asked
- Monthly report — uptime %, incidents, response times
- Quarterly review — trends, recommendations, next steps
When a client receives a monthly report showing 99.97% uptime, 2 incidents detected and resolved within 15 minutes, and a branded status page on their domain — they don't question the 300 EUR/month invoice.