Three words, three different products
Indian vendors use these interchangeably, which is how owners buy a ₹5,000 support plan for a ₹1,00,000 rescue. The definitions from this desk, published because the confusion is expensive:
Maintenance: the rhythm
Ongoing, scheduled care that prevents failure: updates tested on staging, backups with restores, monitoring, small monthly edits, security patching. You buy it when the site works and must keep working. Band: ₹14,000 – ₹47,500/month senior-level, see the care plans and the AMC guide.
Support: the requests
Ad-hoc changes and questions: a new page, a banner, "can the form also send to accounts?", integration tweaks. Sold hourly or as blocks. Band: ₹1,900 – ₹3,300/hour senior India band, or prepaid blocks at a small discount. Support is what you need between maintenance cycles, and it is not a substitute for maintenance: support fixes what you notice, maintenance prevents what you would not.
Rescue: the fire
The site is down, hacked, de-indexed, spam-flooded, or eating orders. Urgent, scoped tight, priced for priority: ₹28,000 – ₹1,70,000+ by severity, see the emergency desk. Rescue exists because prevention was skipped, and the honest rescue technician will say so, then fix the cause, not just the symptom.
How to tell which you need right now
- Site works, must keep working: maintenance.
- Site works, you need changes: support.
- Site is broken, hacked, penalized or losing orders as you read this: rescue, today.
The pattern from real engagements
Rescue clients become maintenance clients within a month, because the rescue reveals why the site broke and the fix is a rhythm. Support clients become maintenance clients within six months, because the "small changes" reveal the underlying neglect. The cheapest path is maintenance from a working start; the most expensive is rescue repeated annually, see why sites break in the first 90 days.
Run the audit first
If you cannot tell which one you need, run the lost-leads audit: its findings name the service. Or describe the situation and get the honest answer, including "maintenance is enough", which is said here more often than anywhere upselling happens.