WordPress Care Plan Pricing: What Agencies Actually Charge in 2026

Every agency that builds WordPress sites eventually gets asked the same question: “so who looks after this once it’s live?”

The honest answer is that somebody has to, forever. The question is whether you charge for it, and how much. This is a look at what the market actually costs in 2026 — using published prices, not guesses — and how to price a care plan that holds up.

Two different prices get called “care plan pricing”

Most confusion here comes from mixing up two numbers:

1. Wholesale — what you pay a partner to do the work behind the scenes.
2. Retail — what your client pays you every month for the care plan with your name on it.

Your margin lives in the gap. So start with wholesale, because that is the number you can look up.

What wholesale care costs in 2026

Published, white-label, per-site pricing as of July 2026:

Two things stand out.

First, the spread is enormous — roughly $34 to $359 per site per month for services that all get called “care.” The difference is almost never the update button. It is who answers when something breaks, whether client edit requests are included, and whether anyone is accountable for the platform underneath.

Second, the cheapest line items are not the whole plan. A $39 maintenance plan plus a $99 edits plan is a $138 wholesale cost. Price your retail plan against the wholesale bundle you will actually buy, not the headline number on the pricing page.

So what should you charge your clients?

Work backwards from three things.

1. Your wholesale cost. Anchor on the numbers above for the level of service you intend to promise.

2. The margin you need. Agencies running profitable care plans generally price at a multiple of wholesale, not a markup of a few dollars — the plan has to fund your own account management, reporting and the occasional bad week, not just the vendor invoice. As a benchmark, the retail tiers we see working across agencies on WP Aligned are roughly $79/mo for a basic care plan, $149/mo for a standard plan, and $249/mo for a premium plan, per site. Against a $138 wholesale bundle, that tells you plainly where the basic tier stops being a business and starts being a favour.

3. What the plan actually removes from the client’s life. Nobody has ever been excited about plugin updates. They are excited that their site is not their problem. Care plans priced as a maintenance checklist get compared line by line. Care plans priced as someone is accountable for this site do not.

The pricing mistake that costs agencies the most

Underpricing is the obvious one. The expensive one is subtler: pricing a care plan you cannot actually deliver.

If the plan promises a fast response at 2am and the response is you, in bed, on your phone, then the real cost of that plan is not on the invoice. It is paid in weekends, in founder attention, and eventually in a client leaving after an outage that took nine hours to notice.

That is why the wholesale number matters more than it looks. You are not buying tasks. You are buying the ability to make a promise you can keep at 3am on a Sunday — and the ability to keep making it as you go from 15 sites to 150.

How to build a care plan you can price with a straight face

• Pick one plan, maybe two. Three tiers with fine-grained differences make the buying decision harder and the delivery harder.
• Price per site, monthly. It scales with your book of business and it is easy for a client to say yes to.
• Put the response promise in writing. Response time is the product. If you cannot name it, you cannot charge for it.
• Bundle hosting into it. Owning the platform is what makes the promise deliverable, and it removes the awkward conversation where a client’s cheap host is the reason their site is down but not, apparently, your problem.
• Review the price yearly. Costs move. Plans priced in 2022 are being delivered in 2026.

Where WP Aligned fits

We are not a care plan vendor you resell. We are the technical department behind your agency — a fractional CTO and continuity partner, so the infrastructure decisions, the monitoring, the updates and the 2am escalation belong to someone whose job that is.

Our Elite tier is $34 per site per month and includes that care, which means the plan you sell to your client stays yours: your brand, your client relationship, your recurring revenue, your margin. We power it and stand behind it.

You keep the customer. You add a technical team that answers to you.

If you are pricing or repricing a care plan this year, we are happy to look at the numbers with you — including telling you when a site is a liability before it becomes one.

Book with Bobby — a short call to look at your care plan numbers together.