Most freelancers build a site, hand it over and invoice once. Six months later the client’s cousin has broken the theme, the SSL has expired and the domain is a parking page. The client blames you anyway. A care plan turns that mess into predictable monthly revenue and a client who stays.
Monitoring is the part of the care plan that is cheapest to deliver and easiest to prove. This is how people who do it well structure it.
Why monitoring is the anchor
Updates and backups are invisible when they work. Monitoring produces a visible artefact every month: a report that says “your site was up 99.98% of the time, we caught two incidents before you noticed, your SSL and domain are fine.” That piece of paper is the product. The client is not paying for uptime checks; they are paying for the feeling that someone is watching.
It also costs almost nothing. A Tenium Pro account at $29 a month covers 300 monitors, which is roughly 60 client sites at five monitors each. If each of those clients pays $39 a month for the basic care plan, monitoring is under 2% of revenue. Agency at $59 adds client workspaces and per-client reports; with 12 clients at $49 to $79 each, the tool costs about $5 per client and leaves around 90% of the revenue, before your own time. The agency page has the full maths.
Three tiers that work
Prices below are what we see from European freelancers and small studios. Adjust for your market.
Essential, $29–49 / month
- Uptime monitoring every minute with alerts to you
- SSL and domain expiry monitoring
- Monthly report by email (PDF)
- WordPress core and plugin updates, monthly
- Daily off-site backups, 30-day retention
This is the “we are watching” tier. Most clients belong here.
Business, $79–149 / month
Everything in Essential plus:
- 30-second checks and a public status page on their domain (status.theirsite.com)
- Keyword check on the home page and checkout, so “Error establishing a database connection” is caught
- Weekly updates with a visual regression check
- 2 hours of content changes a month
- Same-day response during business hours
Priority, $249+ / month
Everything in Business plus:
- Telegram and email alerts to you, with a promised response time
- Performance monitoring and a quarterly speed report
- Staging site and tested deployments
- Priority queue for new work
Only shops and lead-generation sites that lose real money per hour of downtime need this. Price it so that you would be happy to get out of bed.
What to promise, and what not to
Do promise that you will be notified within a minute of an outage, that the client will receive a monthly report, and a response time during defined hours.
Do not promise uptime percentages. You do not control the host, the plugins the client installs, or Cloudflare. Promise monitoring and response, not outcomes. The hosting provider’s SLA is theirs to keep.
Do say in writing who is notified and when. “We are alerted by Telegram and email, 24/7. We respond during business hours, 9–18 local time, within two hours. Out-of-hours response is available on the Priority plan.” Expectations stated in advance prevent the angry Sunday call.
The monthly report
This is the thing that keeps the client paying. It should be one page and it should arrive on the first of the month without you doing anything.
What goes on it:
- Uptime percentage for the month, with the number of incidents and total downtime in minutes.
- Incident list: when, how long, what the error was, and what you did. Two incidents of three minutes each, resolved automatically, looks like competence. Zero incidents looks like nothing happened.
- Response time average and trend. A line that goes up is a conversation starter about hosting upgrades.
- SSL and domain: expiry dates and “valid” in green.
- Updates performed: count of plugins, themes and core updates, pulled from your maintenance log.
- Your logo, their logo, and one sentence in plain language: “Everything is healthy. We recommend nothing this month.”
Tenium generates items 1–4 automatically. On Pro you get one branded report for the account. On Agency, every client workspace gets its own report with your branding and the client’s logo, sent automatically on the 1st to a list you choose. Add a paragraph for items 5 and 6 or let the template fill it. On Starter you get a plain monthly summary email for yourself, not a client-ready PDF.
Status pages as a sales tool
A status page on the client’s domain does two jobs. It gives the client somewhere to look when they are worried, instead of calling you. And it carries your “Maintained by Your Studio” footer in front of their customers and their business friends. We have seen agencies get referrals from a status page footer alone.
On Agency, each client workspace gets its own status pages and a viewer login, so the client can see their monitors without seeing anyone else’s.
Getting existing clients onto a plan
Send the ones who have no plan a short email: “We now monitor every site we have built. Yours has been checked every minute for the last two weeks; here is the report. The care plan is $39 a month and includes updates and backups. Reply yes and we will start on the first.” Attaching a real report for their site, generated before they pay, converts far better than a brochure.
Start the monitors today. The report writes itself.
Related
The pieces mentioned above have their own pages: client reports, client workspaces, white-label status pages, WordPress monitoring and SSL monitoring. To price the plan against alternatives see the UptimeRobot comparison, and to try it with your own numbers see for agencies or pricing.
Related
Related Tenium pages
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