Is a monthly website care plan worth it for a small business?

A care plan is worth it when someone has to notice the site is broken before a customer does, and when the site changes often enough that you want a person on call to change it. It is not worth it when nothing on the site will ever change and your platform already keeps the lights on for you.

Here is what a plan is, what goes wrong on a site nobody watches, and how to decide.

What a care plan is, exactly

Ours is the one we can describe precisely, so here it is. The Care Plan is $95 a month and includes hosting, updates and a backup we test restoring; uptime monitoring with a person who responds when it fires; the full pre-launch gate re-run every month with the report emailed to you; up to one hour of small edits each month, such as hours, a photo, a price or a new team member; and security headers and dependencies kept current (Source: DarkTiger Studios Care Plan page).

Care Plan Plus is $175 a month and adds a monthly report from Google with impressions, clicks, calls and direction requests, one new answer page written and published every month, structured data and your Google Business Profile kept current, up to three hours of edits, and a twenty-minute quarterly review call (Source: DarkTiger Studios Care Plan page).

Both are month to month with no contract. Cancel at the billing page or by text or email, you are not charged again, and within five business days we hand over a full copy of the site and transfer every account we were invited into, free (Source: DarkTiger Studios Refunds and cancellations). If we built the site, the first month is included.

Other studios' plans differ. The questions below apply to any of them.

What goes wrong on a site nobody watches

The certificate is the plain example. The security certificate that makes a site load over HTTPS is not permanent. Let's Encrypt, one common certificate issuer, states that its default certificates are valid for 90 days (Source: Let's Encrypt FAQ). Renewal is usually automatic. When it fails, nothing announces it. The browser simply starts labeling the site Not secure, which Chrome explains as "The site doesn't use a private connection. Someone may be able to view and change the information you send and get through this site." (Source: Google Chrome Help).

We do not have a number for how often this happens to small-business sites. We can tell you it is the kind of failure that is invisible from the owner's chair, because the owner rarely opens their own site.

The same shape applies to the hosting bill on a card that expired, a contact form whose delivery service changed its terms, and a plugin that stopped getting updates. None of them send you a letter.

When it is not worth it

Be honest with yourself about three things:

• Will the site ever change? If the hours, prices, team and photos are the same in two years, you do not need edit hours.
• Who renews the certificate and pays the hosting? If your site lives on a hosted builder and the plan is paid, the platform does that part. You are already paying for a slice of what a care plan covers.
• Will anyone check it? If the answer is "me, when I remember," the honest alternative to a monthly plan is a yearly check by someone who knows what to look for.

If all three come out the same way, skip the plan and put a reminder in your calendar.

The arithmetic

The Care Plan is $95 a month, which is $1,140 a year. Plus is $175 a month, $2,100 a year. Compare that against what you pay now for hosting, the form service, the backup tool and the person you call when it breaks, and against the hour you spend when it breaks on a Saturday. If your current total is close to zero and the site never changes, the plan is a cost. If you have ever lost a week to a site problem, it is cheaper than the week.

Next step

Read the plan page and decide with the three questions above in front of you. If the answers point to "someone should be watching," the plans and the cancel terms are at /care-plan.