The three pricing tiers
- Essential ($39–$99/mo) — Hosting, SSL, weekly updates, daily backups, uptime monitoring, ~30 min of edits.
- Growth ($79–$149/mo) — Everything above + Core Web Vitals tuning, priority support, ~1–2 hours of edits, SEO health checks.
- Premium ($149–$299/mo) — Everything above + monthly SEO work, content updates, 24/7 response, Google Business Profile management.
What drives the price up or down
- Platform — a static site costs less to maintain than WordPress with 40 plugins.
- How much content changes each month — a blog with weekly posts needs more than a brochure site.
- Support SLA — 1-business-day email support is cheap; 1-hour phone support is not.
- Whether SEO work is bundled in — real ongoing SEO adds $200–$1,000/mo to a plan.
Red flags in the low end
Anything under $29/month for a business site is usually automated-only: hosting and backups on a bot, with no human eyes on the site. Fine for a personal blog; risky for a business that depends on the phone ringing.
Red flags in the high end
Over $500/month should include real, ongoing SEO or content work — not just maintenance. If a vendor quotes $600/month "for maintenance" with no content deliverable, ask exactly what's produced each month.
The fair number for most Bay Area small businesses
$79–$149/month buys enough real, human maintenance to keep a WordPress or modern JS site healthy, backed up, and quietly ranking. That's the tier we recommend by default for our Bay Area clients.