one year running a website maintenance service solo, the actual numbers

i went full time on a website maintenance service last august after freelancing builds for years, so this is the twelve month writeup nobody gives you. started with 6 sites carried over from build clients, ended the year at 23 on plans plus a handful of hourly one offs. pricing is three tiers: 1. a 39/mo basic that is really just backups, updates and uptime, 2. an 89/mo that adds monthly edits and a speed pass, 3. a 149/mo care plan with priorty support and a staging site. most people land on the middle one. gross recurring is a bit over 2100/mo, that is not quit your job money but it is predictble in a way project work never was.

the part nobody warns you about is that revenue and effort do not line up per tier. the 39 clients are quiet, maybe 20 min a month. the 149 clients think they hired an employee and will email at 11pm about a comma in a headline. i tracked hours for six months: the basic tier ran about 91% margin on time, the top tier closer to 40% once you count the hand holding. two clients ate more support than the other twenty one combined, and i finally offboarded one in month nine. the one i held onto too long cost me more in dread than his 149 ever brought in, and i should have trusted that pattern by month three. churn was 3 sites over the year, all three because the underlying business folded, none because they were unhappy, and that tells me the price is if anything to low.

what i would do different is charge a real onboarding fee, because the first month of any new site is where all the hidden debt lives, the broken cron, the 40 pending updates, the plugin nobody can explain. i undercharged for that discovery work all year and basically funded it out of my own weekends. i also stopped promising same day turnaround on the middle tier, which quietly trained every client that every request was urgent. the recurring model is the right shape, i am just still learning where to put the fences.