Once a small business has a website, a quieter question arrives: who keeps it alive? An industry answers with the care plan — a monthly retainer, typically $50 to $150, that keeps a (usually WordPress) site hosted, patched, and backed up.
What a typical care plan includes
- Hosting — the site lives on the provider's server.
- Software updates — WordPress core, themes, and plugins get patched before the vulnerabilities in them get exploited.
- Backups — usually daily, so a bad update or hack can be rolled back.
- Uptime monitoring — someone gets paged if the site goes down.
- Small fixes — a broken link, a stuck plugin; most plans cap this at an hour or so a month.
What it usually does not include
The word to notice is maintenance. Care plans keep the site you already have running as it already is. Outside the fence, billed separately:
- New pages, sections, or features
- Design changes and redesigns
- Content updates beyond the included hour
- "Can we add a form / gallery / booking thing?" — that is a project, quoted separately
None of that is a criticism. It is honest scoping: a human's hours are the scarce input, so the plan sells you a small, predictable slice of them. At $100/month you are buying roughly one hour of professional attention plus automated hygiene — and before 2026 that was simply what "someone else runs my website" cost.
What changed
The scarce input stopped being human hours. An AI engineer attached to your server does not price its attention by the hour, which moves the whole category's floor. At OneSmallPrompt, from $9 a month, the equivalent of the care plan is structural rather than a service tier: your site lives on its own isolated server slice with HTTPS, and the engineer that built it stays aboard to fix what breaks and change what you ask — new pages and features included, described in plain English, inside your plan's monthly allowance. Bigger plans add checkpoints (roll back to any save point) and scheduled work — the automated cousins of "backups" and "monitoring."
A fair caveat in both directions: if your site is a complex WordPress build with fifteen plugins and a designer's custom theme, a human care plan that knows that stack is the right product, and $50–$150 is a fair price for it. If your site is a small business's site — pages, forms, galleries, leads — the economics now favor the operator model by an order of magnitude. The full comparison of every path is in our guide to getting a site without building it.