How to sell care plans to clients who already have their site

Selling care plans to new clients is easy — it goes in the proposal. Selling them to people whose site you built two years ago, and have been quietly maintaining for free, is the awkward one.

That awkwardness is why most agencies never do it, and why they carry the liability without the revenue.

Start with the ones already costing you

Not the whole list. The three or four clients who email you most often with small requests.

You are already doing the work. The conversation is not "would you like to start paying for something" — it is "let us formalise what has been happening anyway", which is a much easier thing to say and to hear.

What to actually say

Do not lead with features. Nobody buys backups.

Lead with the risk they are currently carrying:

"Your site has not had updates applied since we launched it. There are currently six plugins with known security issues. I would rather fix that than explain it after something happens — can I put it on a care plan?"

Or with what they are already getting:

"You have emailed me four times this quarter with small changes, and I have not billed you for any of it. That is not sustainable for me, and it also means there is no agreement about how fast I respond. A care plan fixes both — $150 a month, and you get a guaranteed response time instead of my goodwill."

That second one is honest about your side of it, which is why it works. Clients generally understand that free help has a ceiling.

Give them the evidence, not the argument

Run a health check on their site and send the result. Our free plugin produces a report you can forward, or you can generate one yourself.

A list saying "your PHP stopped receiving security updates in 2022, six plugins have published vulnerabilities, and there is no backup system running" does the selling. You are not making a case; you are showing them a state of affairs.

This also reframes the conversation from cost to risk, which is where it should be.

Pricing it

Do not offer one plan. Offer two or three, and make the middle one the obvious choice. Most clients pick the middle option, which is why it should be the one you want to sell.

Detailed pricing guidance here, but the short version: $100–200 a month is the normal range for a small business site, and pricing below $80 tends to attract clients who then expect unlimited support.

Handling the objections

"My host already does this." Sometimes partly true. Ask what their host actually covers — usually core updates and server backups, not plugin updates, not checking the site afterwards, and nobody fixing anything. The distinction is here.

"Nothing has gone wrong so far." True, and that is the argument, not the counter-argument. Sites do not degrade visibly until they fail. Show them the health report.

"Can I just call you when something breaks?" You can, and it will cost more and take longer, because an emergency is always more expensive than prevention — and you cannot promise availability to someone who is not on a plan.

"It is too expensive." Compare it to one incident. A cleanup is $250–500 and a day of downtime costs most businesses more than a year of the plan. If it is genuinely too expensive for them, offer the cheapest tier rather than discounting the middle one.

Make it easy to say yes

• A one-page summary, not a proposal document
• A clear price, not "from"
• No contract, cancel any time. This removes most of the resistance and almost nobody actually leaves
• A link they can pay on, not an invoice you have to chase

Where the delivery comes from

The reason agencies avoid this conversation is often not the selling — it is knowing they cannot reliably deliver it once sold.

That is what white label maintenance solves: you sell the plan and keep the client relationship, someone else does the weekly work under your name. It turns care plans from a commitment you have to staff into a margin you collect.