How agencies sell website monitoring to clients

Monitoring is the easiest thing in a website care plan to deliver and the hardest to see. When it works, nothing happens. The agencies that make money from it have solved one problem: making the invisible work visible, every month, with their name on it.

This guide covers what to include, how to price it, how to set it up so it scales past ten clients, and a margin calculation based on real plan prices. It complements the broader post on selling monitoring as part of a care plan; this one goes deeper on the numbers and the client-facing pieces.

What the client is actually buying

Clients do not want uptime checks. They want three things:

1. Someone is watching. An outage is noticed by you before it is noticed by their customers.
2. Someone will act. A named person responds within a stated time.
3. Proof. A page or report that shows it happened, without them asking.

Everything you build should serve one of those three. A status page serves the first and third. A branded report serves the third. A response-time promise serves the second.

The pieces, and which plan has them

Be exact about this in your own service description. If you sell “a monthly report per client” on Pro, you are building those reports by hand from one account report.

Pricing models that work

Included in the care plan. Monitoring is one bullet in the Essential tier ($29 to $49 a month for updates, backups and monitoring). Simple to sell and hard to compare, since the client sees a package.

A separate line. “Website monitoring and monthly report: $9 a month per site.” Easier to start with existing clients who have no care plan, and it often becomes the first step towards one.

Tiered by speed and response. $9 for one-minute checks with a monthly report, $19 with a status page and a two-hour response window, $39 with Telegram alerts to you and a named response time. Price the response promise, not the checks.

Do not price below what it costs you to support. A client who calls twice a month about an alert they do not understand costs more than the subscription.

The margin, calculated

Take an agency with 20 client sites and five monitors each (home page, a keyword check, the login page, SSL and domain expiry): 100 monitors.

• On Pro at $29 a month, 100 monitors fit easily (300 allowed). You get white-label pages and one branded report; per-client reports are manual.
• On Agency at $59 a month ($49 a month billed yearly), you also get client workspaces and automatic per-client reports.

Revenue minus the tool, on Agency, at three prices per client:

The tool costs $2.95 per client per month at 20 clients, and the cost per client falls as you add clients, because the plan covers up to 1000 monitors. These are list prices and exclude your own time, any tax and payment fees. They also assume clients actually pay; the margin vanishes with unpaid invoices, not with software.

Setting it up so it scales

For each new client, the routine should take ten minutes:

1. Create a client workspace (Agency) with the client’s name and logo.
2. Add the five standard monitors or import them. Keep the same names on every client so the report is consistent.
3. Attach contacts: you first, the client later. Client contacts in a workspace are notified after a client alert delay, 30 minutes by default, so you hear about a problem first.
4. Create the status page on a subdomain of the client’s domain and point a CNAME at it. White-label removes Tenium branding, and you can add your own footer.
5. Invite the client contact as a viewer. Their login opens in their workspace only.
6. Set report recipients. The first report goes out on the 1st of the next month.

Use the uptime calculator when a client asks what “99.9%” means: it is about 43 minutes of downtime a month.

What to promise, in writing

Put this in the service description, in plain words:

• Checks every minute (or 30 seconds), and an alert to your team within a minute of a confirmed failure.
• Who is alerted and when: “Telegram and email, 24/7. We respond between 9 and 18 local time within two hours.”
• A monthly report on the first working day.
• What is not included: restoring the site is billed at the agreed hourly rate unless the care plan covers it; the host’s own downtime is not your responsibility.

Never promise a phone call, an SMS or an uptime percentage. Tenium does not send SMS or call, and you do not control the host.

A client email you can copy

Subject: We are now monitoring [site]

Hello [Name],

From today we check [site] every minute and we are alerted if it stops loading, if the checkout breaks, or if the certificate or the domain is close to expiring. We respond within two hours between 9 and 18.

You will get a one-page report on the first working day of each month with uptime, incidents, response time and certificate dates. Your status page is at status.[domain], and your login is attached.

Monitoring is [price] a month, billed with your care plan. Reply “yes” and we start today.

Attach a real report for their site before they pay: two weeks of data from a free account is enough. It converts better than any brochure.

What goes wrong

• Selling a report you cannot produce. Generate a sample first.
• Alerts to the client by default. They will phone you at night. Alert yourself and let the client contact follow after a delay.
• One shared status page for all clients. One client’s outage becomes everyone’s business. Use one page per client.
• No owner for renewals. Certificates and domains expire on someone’s watch; write down whose, and monitor both (SSL expiry guide).

Start on the free plan with a few of your own sites to see the dashboard; the agency page shows the client workspace view, and the website monitoring page describes the checks. If you are leaving another tool, the Tenium vs UptimeRobot comparison lines up the plans.

Frequently asked questions

Related

Related Tenium pages

• Website monitoring
• Uptime calculator
• Tenium vs UptimeRobot
• All blog posts
• Pricing