The honest monthly bands
Maintenance is the most under-priced and most misunderstood line in Indian web budgets. Here is what senior care actually costs, from the calculator's published bands:
| Site type | Monthly band (INR) | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Business site, no care (DIY with checklist) | ₹0 + your time | Updates, backups and monitoring land on you |
| Business site, standard care | ₹4,000 – ₹14,200 | Updates, backups, uptime monitoring, small edits |
| Store / app care | ₹14,000 – ₹47,500 | Heavier: checkout health, integration checks, priority fixes |
A ₹500/month "maintenance package" buys an automated update plugin and a prayer. When it breaks, and it will, the emergency fix costs more than years of real care.
What a real care plan includes
- Core, theme and plugin updates, tested on staging before production.
- Off-site backups with a tested restore, not just a backup button.
- Uptime monitoring with alerts that reach a human.
- Security patching and malware scanning.
- A budget of small edits every month: content swaps, banner changes, new pages in your sitemap.
- A monthly report a non-technical owner can read.
The math nobody argues with
An emergency rescue after a hacked or broken site runs ₹25,000–₹1,50,000+ and days of downtime. Standard care over the same period costs a fraction of one incident. Maintenance is not an upsell, it is insurance priced fairly.
Red flags in cheap maintenance packages
- "Unlimited small changes" with no definition of small.
- No staging environment: updates get tested on your live site, with your revenue.
- Backups stored on the same server as the site.
- No named human. Ticket queues are where small edits go to die.
- Annual lock-ins before the first month proves their response time.
DIY vs care plan
If your site is small and static and you enjoy the work, the maintenance checklist is free and honest. The moment the site generates leads or orders, your hourly cost exceeds a care plan, and the checklist stops being followed the first busy month. That is not a criticism, it is arithmetic.
Bottom line
Compare care plans on response time, staging discipline, backup restore tests and named accountability. Or run the numbers yourself in the calculator: the care question adds the monthly band and a first-year total to your estimate.