Our company has found a web design studio to build a WordPress/Woocommerce eccomerce website. We are currently negotiating price.
The site is about to sell a single profuct in many configurations (require complex custom configurator and good design). They give a price for about 18 000$ for english version + 11000$ for another 2 language versions on different domains.
We are ok about that. However above that they want to charge us 400$ for maintenance per month for updates and bug fixes, especially the configurator.
Is it normal to receive a wordpress website for such a price without warranty and to have to pay extra for maintenence?
Thank you!
EDIT: actually it happens to have 3 months warranty and the prices do not include media editing and texts creating.
Hard to say without knowing specifics about the project, but it could be their standard rate, which would differ greatly from an amateur freelancer.
An agency is going to charge you that, yes. You can find cheaper agencies or freelancers, but if you trust this agency, go for it, for an ecomm it seems ok (US Prices, i’m in Argentina, for me that’s a LOT of money)
Charging a maintenance fee is common. WordPress/Woocommerce need to be updated regularly and those updates may brake the site, specially if there are a lot of plugins. Payment Gateways are in my experience a hit or miss every update, so every time there is an update, I have to do an extensive buying test, that takes time. Also updates, managing backups, fixing thing, answering questions, changing content, etc.
It’s normal to pay some sort of maintenance fee, if you agree for them to manage the site.
$50 – 200 is a more common price bracket per month. $400 is more expensive than most, but it depends on the exact nature website and the support you’ll receive, essentially it depends how many hours of support you require.
What’s included in the maintenance/care plan? I’ll tell you if it makes sense or not.
I charge similar price or slightly less, which includes:
* Weekly updates to the WordPress Core, Plugins and Themes.
* Daily website backups ( Kept for 90 days ).
* Security checks and malware scanning.
* Technical support and troubleshooting up to 45 minutes per month.
* Yearly PHP check ( update to the latest stable PHP version )
This is the care plan just to cover myself, but in reality I spend a lot of time doing fixes. Just today I had to spend 3 hours to sort an outage issue, but wouldn’t charge the client extra for it because they are a good people.
Yes it’s normal to pay for maintenance because your projects seem big. About the price to develop a site, I’m not sure how big the project is because you’re paying a lot of money.
Even big and expert WordPress agencies like WPBeginner or SeaHawk Media are charging $1299 for a [custom website](https://www.wpbeginner.com/services/wordpress-website-design/#pricing) and $1398 for WooCommerce site.
Plus their [best value WordPress maintenance plan](https://www.wpbeginner.com/services/wordpress-site-maintenance/) with a lot of services included costing like $107.5 per month so way cheaper.
There is no normal/abnormal, fair/unfair pricing in a free market. People are free to charge what they want for their service, and you’re free to accept or reject their offer. Think of maintenance plans as a convenience of not having to worry when shit hits the fan. Technology is fragile and held together by a million different things, so you can be assured that shit *will* hit the fan at some point in future. If that convenience is worth $400 per month to you, and you’re happy with the agency’s work, keep them around. If it’s completely out of your budget, try to negotiate or look elsewhere.
$18k for the first site is in line with what we would charge for what you are describing, but you really haven’t given enough details to say for sure. We charge $150/mo for hosting, maintenance, and support. That includes 1 hour per site.
I won’t say about pricing as it differs from agency to agency. But yes it’s normal and you really want to have a maintenance plan. The “warranty” would be to tackle bugs related to the development. But SW is always evolving and you need to constantly keep it up to date to ensure security and performance. Well, plus hosting, monitoring and backups.
It is common to pay extra for ongoing maintenance, especially if you want regular updates, backups and bug fixes
It’s definitely normal to maintain a website over time. A website needs regular software updates and bug fixes, ideally from a skilled technician who is capable of resolving bugs on their own, not necessarily just reporting them to third-party plugin vendors and hoping they fix them.
Bug fixes can be more complicated when you have multiple pieces of software from different vendors all mashed together on the same site. It’s sometimes unclear which vendor is responsible for fixing a conflict in another vendor’s code. Ultimately, it’s your responsibility.
I’m sorry to say website maintenance is not an option, especially for a business-critical website.
With that said, it seems like the question is mostly about the cost.
$400 per month sounds reasonable, however based on your other comment it sounds like that’s out of budget.
What is in your budget?
You can attempt to do-it-yourself by subscribing to a managed WordPress hosting provider. They can make it easy to set up staging environments to test plugin updates on your own before trying it on a production environment.
You also might want to look into some security vulnerability solutions like Solid Security Pro (with Patchstack) or Jetpack Scan. Running traffic through Cloudflare is probably a good idea as well.
Basically, WordPress maintenance services will leverage software like this and there’s nothing stopping you from using the same tools as they do.
There would still be some recurring costs, to be clear, although it may be a little more friendly to your budget.
The bigger question for me is why create separate websites for different languages at a cost of $11k? I would recommend using [WPML](https://wpml.org/) (WordPress Multi-Language) which allows you to create language variants of some or all of your content all within a single wordpress instance. The user can toggle between languages offered.
It all depends on the complexity of the project the more complex the more they would charge. Maintenance is key when it comes to WordPress websites there are updates every now and then the website could be fine today and break entirely tomorrow.So all in all it is better to subscribe to their maintenance especially if they built the site since they would know where all the code snippets are and other complex settings.
Hard to say if the full build price is justified without further details.
Regarding monthly maintenance, as a one man agency myself I charge based my maintenance fee on how “needy” the client is. Also it really has nothing to do with warranty that $400 a month is to hold your hand, walk you through any questions and sure likely make some personal preference changes for you.
US Based with all US Clients – $400 a month is a fair rate, maybe a little underpriced compared to their full build price tag.
I had the chance to be the PM of a big E-commerce site build ($60,000). That included everything, from discovery, design, development, e-commerce configurations and all that. So yeah that’s not a bad price you have there. I would probably charge from 20-30k for any mid sized website like that.
For maintenance it depends what do they include on the SoW. If that budget/time goes to updating the CMS and applying fixes to any issues found, then it’s OK. There is usually a lot of fixes required to maintain a big e-commerce site.
I run a pretty established web/software development company out here in Florida. Honestly, the development price seems reasonable judging they have expertise to back up the price they’re charging. However, for maintenance $400 for 2 hours a month is not reasonable. Try negotiating with them as what some companies do is do the most minimal work for maintenance/outsource and focus more on their new development customers. Just a heads up from me!
I wouldn’t do this WordPress. Look at some alternatives first. Are they pushing WordPress because thats all the do? Are you pushing WordPress for some reason?
The configurator is the key part here. Find an agency or developer who specializes in those and let them guide you what framework/CMS/SaaS platform you should choose
You seem to be under the common misperception that once a website is built, the work is over. This is far from true. It’s not like a fridge or other machine which just ticks over once built. It is more like high volume precision engineering which requires constant maintenance or a boat, which needs constant maintenance because it is in a hostile environment. The site will get attacked by hackers 24×7 at levels you would be shocked by. Hence the need for constant security monitoring and non-stop upgrades.
Never calculate a website budget purely on construction costs. Use a “cost of ownership” calculation. Spread the construction cost over 1-2 years + 5,000/yr ownership. So that’s around 15,000/year for first two years, then 5,000/yr to own it. If you make a 25% profit on sales, that means you need to sell 60,000/year starting the instant it is launched. If you want to break even in the first year, that’s around 100,000 in sales. Allowing a couple of months for marketing and SEO to kick in, that’s around 10,000/month in sales.
If 400/month is too much for your budget, your planning is bad – massively cut the construction budget.
Very reasonable, I’d be charging you more. Tell us what else is included, backups? Hardening? Ticket type support?