A client came to me recently wanting to know if I could match a offer they got from a competitor to host their website for $500/year. I don’t fault anyone from wanting to save money, but what my client didn’t realize is that while they’re paying me $1,188/year, hosting is only a small piece of what’s included.
When you compare a management plan to a hosting-only offer, you’re comparing apples to a fruit basket — hosting is just one line item among many. This post lays out the real, itemized cost of everything a professional WordPress site needs to stay running, so you can see what’s actually included when you pay for management (mine or anyone else’s) and what you’d be signing up for if you took it all on yourself.
This comes up often enough that I want to lay it all out — every tool, every service, every recurring cost that a professional WordPress site typically requires. That way when you’re comparing options (mine or anyone else’s), you’re comparing on the same terms.
Everything that goes into a professional WordPress site
Here’s the itemized version of what’s included in my management services for a typical site I build. These are the tools and services I use on most projects, along with what they cost if you were purchasing them on your own.
| Category | Tool | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Rocket.net | $300 |
| Transactional Email | Postmark | $180 |
| Theme & Page Builder | GeneratePress & GenerateBlocks | $149 |
| Performance | Perfmatters | $29.95 |
| Image Optimization | ShortPixel | $99.96 |
| Forms | WS Form Pro | $59 |
| Custom Fields | ACF | $49 |
| SEO | SEOPress | $49 |
| Analytics | Fathom Analytics | $180 |
| Backups & Monitoring | WP Umbrella | $26.28 |
| Security | Patchstack | $26.28 |
| Form Testing | CheckView | $420 |
| Labor (Updates & Testing) | Weekly updates, tests, checks | $1,040 (52 hours of staff labor @ $20/hr) |
| Labor (Development) | Changes, additions, & fixes for the site | $1,800 (18 hours of a developer’s labor @ $100/hr) |
| Total | $4,408.47/year |
So how can I do it for a quarter of that?
If you’ve been doing the math along with me, you’ve probably noticed that my Website Management plan is $99/month (or $1,188 a year). That’s a little more than a quarter of what the itemized version above adds up to.
Fair question: how?
There’s no trick to it, and I want to walk through it honestly, because I think the answer is actually kind of interesting.
I buy in bulk
Almost every tool on that list has volume pricing. When you’re an individual buying a single Perfmatters license, you pay retail. When you’re an agency buying 25+ licenses, you pay a fraction of retail per site. Same with backups and monitoring, security, forms, hosting — nearly all of them.
I’ve been buying these tools for years, at agency volume, across every client site I manage. That’s not something I invented — it’s how the entire industry works. Every professional agency doing this at scale is getting the same kinds of discounts. What it means for you is that the tools on your site are the same tools you’d buy retail, just at the price I get for buying them in quantity.
I do the labor in bulk too
The line item on the chart for “weekly updates, testing, and checks” is 52 hours a year — roughly an hour per week. If you were paying someone to do that on your one site, that’s what it would take, because they’d be setting up their tools, logging in, checking things, and doing it fresh each time.
I’m running updates across every site I manage on the same schedule, using the same tools, in the same session. What takes an hour on a single site takes a fraction of that per site when I’m working across the whole portfolio. Same job, but the efficiency is real.
Same goes for security monitoring, uptime checks, and every other recurring task. Doing them across many sites at once isn’t cutting corners — it’s just how you make the math work at this price point.
The development time
The chart includes 18 hours a year of development time (based on the “three 30-minute tasks” a month I include in my plan) at $100/hour (the industry average). That’s the part where the math seems like it can’t possibly work.
Here’s the honest answer: not every client uses all three tasks every month. Some months a client sends me two or three; some months, none. Across all my management plan clients, the actual demand averages out to something the whole model can support.
I want to be clear about what that isn’t: it isn’t clients who use their tasks subsidizing clients who don’t. The three tasks a month are yours — you can use them, every month, and I’ll do them. What it is is closer to how any on-demand service works. You pay to have access to an expert when you need one, without a project, without a minimum, without a negotiation. Some months you’ll use that access, some months you won’t. The value is in having it, not in consuming it every single time.
It’s the same reason you pay for car insurance every month whether you get in an accident or not. You’re not paying for a specific event — you’re paying for the certainty that you’re covered when you need to be.
That model only works because it’s a bundle across many clients. If everyone used every task every month, the price would have to be higher. But most months, most clients don’t need something. And on the months you do, I’m there, and it’s already covered.
The stuff that doesn’t fit in a chart at all
Here’s the part that’s actually the hardest to price, and it’s not on the chart above at all.
Unlimited email support. Anytime something on your site is confusing, broken, or worrying, you have an expert you can email — no ticket system, no support tier, no meter running. Most questions get answered the same business day. This isn’t something you can really buy a la carte anywhere. Freelance developers usually charge hourly starting from the first email. Support platforms don’t answer WordPress-specific questions. This is a category of value that only exists inside a relationship like this one.
Someone who knows your site. After a year on the plan, I know your site — how it’s put together, what’s connected to what, why we made the decisions we did, and what to check first when something acts up. If you handed your site to a new developer tomorrow, they’d have to start from scratch just to catch up.
Someone to call when something outside my lane breaks. I have direct relationships with the developers behind most of the tools on your site. When something weird happens with a specific plugin, I can often get answers from the actual developer that a stranger would spend a week trying to find. That’s not a service you can buy — it’s just what comes with doing this work long enough.
One throat to choke. On a DIY setup, when something goes wrong, the host blames the plugin, the plugin blames the host, and you’re stuck in the middle. On the plan, you email me. It’s my problem. I sort it out. That alone is worth something.
Your time. A “30-minute task” I can knock out in 30 minutes might take you two hours — because you’re doing it once, and I’m doing something similar every week. Multiply that across a year and it’s a real number.
The mental load of not thinking about your website. This one’s the hardest to quantify and might be the biggest. When your website is genuinely handled — updates, backups, security, monitoring, licenses, all of it — you get to stop thinking about it. That’s not nothing. Most people badly underestimate how much brainspace a website they’re worried about actually takes up, until they stop worrying about one.
The bottom line
The itemized cost of running a professional WordPress site is real, and the numbers above are honest. The reason I can offer it for less is a combination of volume pricing on the tools, efficiency on the labor, and a bundled on-demand model for the parts that vary month to month.
None of that is a trick. It’s just what a well-run agency looks like — the same way any specialized business can offer things at prices individuals can’t match.
There is plenty of research out there on what website management typically costs from agencies (WP Umbrella’s research, Pantheon’s research, Codeable’s research), and I do everything in my power to keep my prices reasonable (and below industry average).
If you’re comparing options and the price differences are big, ask the same questions on both sides. If someone can offer you the same list of stuff for meaningfully less, ask them how. And if someone’s offering you a fraction of the list at a similar price, know exactly which line items you’d be filling in yourself.
Either way, now you’ve got the numbers.
