How much should I charge my client for Maintenance for their website?

[jessica_10]

Hello Everyone!

I'm curious on how much should I charge my client to maintain his website? updates, few changes.
I am new to this job, so I am not sure how it works, i'm a freelancer.
Website Information :

1. Wordpress
2. They have template already, and information on their website
3. Clients just want me to update, and maintain it.
4. And a little bit of adding some few pages. But not require a lot of work.

I'm not sure how much should i charge him per hour.
Any idea? Please help.

Thank you.

[rproffitt]

My view is the income must be enough for a living. Housing alone here in the USA is in most cities hitting new highs which 15USD a hour will have you living in your car and then it gets worse.

You know what your monthly needs are so it must be that much or very soon you won't be doing this.

[Dani]

Nooo. Don't look at what your expenses are and then charge them based on how much you need. Charge based on how much you're worth, or you're not going to have any clients at all pretty soon, because they'll all go to other freelancers who charge the market rate.

Just because I need $100,000 doesnt' mean I should charge someone $100,000 for 2 hours of easy work.

Realistically, maintaining a Wordpress site for about 5-10 hours a month of work should be about a $200/mo monthly retainer, give or take.

[tallship]

I concur with Dani where billing based on your potential and experience is concerned, however, She's put in $10/hr as a rate for you if you consider 10hrs/wk at a flat subscription of $200/mo.

If you consider that this is only $3200/mo at 40hrs a week (You can only add an additional three clients unless you plan on working more than 40hrs/wk), you're just barely going to be scraping by after rent/mortgage, food, and fuel costs at over $4/gallon and still going up - you may find that you have to choose between two of those three necessities and without working more hours, no way to make additional income.

Compare this to an unskilled fast food job at $15.00/hr which yields $2400/mo gross pay - You're already pricing yourself out of the market.

There's more, because I'm going to cite the tags you used in your question.

We charge $85/hr for non-programming related support, which includes phone support at $1.42 per minute, break fix onsite support services (OSS), and remote support services (RSS) for standard break/fix desktop or very basic server support. Included in this is security patches and updates, unless the client is on a subscription plan or hosts semi-managed servers/services with us.

Everything else is $120/hr - and this includes pretty much everything related to SEO, CSS, and SQL which were tags that you put into your question. Related to keywords and other metadata that you enter into pages and blog articles during editing would obviously come at the lower rate, and where articles are concerned, I encourage the customer to provide the copy that we can just cut and paste, with perhaps some minor edits, etc.

Also, I strongly advise clients to maintain their own WordPress (or other CMS) blogs, and yes, we go over their grammar and spelling anyway because that would otherwise reflect on us, even though it shouldn't.

I really don't know what you mean by "New to this job". Does that mean this is a brand new client and you already work in IT? or are you just now embarking on your career in IT? If it's the latter, I might recommend that you charge a base rate of $45/hr and offer the client a subscription package of $200/mo instead as long as the work you perform doesn't exceed 4 to 5 hours per week (make sure to let them know that's a more than 50% discount you're offering them to care for their infrastructure in your spare time). If you can't complete what is needed within those 4 to five hours per week they know what your base rates are already.

The WordPress tag: Are you going to be installing, managing, and configuring plugins, dealing with SPAM in comments, etc.? If so, make sure you avail yourself of tools like wp-cli and let them know this, because you can save them money due to your proficiency with command line managemet tools. And what about other upsells? How much are you charging them for hosting and remote backups? And have you thought about how much you're going to charge them for the backups you make anyway if they don't subscribe to that service that you offer? I typically charge $5/mo for up to five system snapshots, and try to charge half of whatever the most well known providers charge. i.e., Digital Ocean charges 20% of the price of your server per month for backups - if you charge your customer 5% that's easy money in your pocket without having to do much at all, except when catastrophe strikes, and then you're the big hero that saved the day. Customer's that don't opt-in to daily backups pay $200 per instance for a restore because we maintain disaster recovery services for our own infrastructure, which is intended for us to recover from catastrophic failure, not the customer, so it's a costly expense for them because we're able to restore their services even though those backups weren't intended for them.

Little things like that can help round out your income portfolio, but bottom line, if you're just starting out in IT, I would recommend that especially on a part time basis, that you make sure that your base compensation rate is at least equivalent to $45 per hour,

I hope that helps :)

[Dani]

however, She's put in $10/hr as a rate for you if you consider 10hrs/wk at a flat subscription of $200/mo.

I said 5-10 hours a month for $200, not 10 hours a week. So it would come to $20-40 an hour maintaining a website, as a side gig, as a newbie in web development.

In other words, for someone still learning web development, but wanting to take on some side jobs maintaining someone's website, they would work for one or two hours every weekend and make an extra $200 a month.

Compare this to an unskilled fast food job at $15.00/hr which yields $2400/mo gross pay

But everyone has to start somewhere. As a newbie in web development, you're worth $20-40 per hour. As you get better and better at web development, you can be worth more and more.

offer the client a subscription package of $200/mo instead as long as the work you perform doesn't exceed 4 to 5 hours per week

That's exactly what I was suggesting :)

[RichardBBibbs]

Depends on the site and your experiance level. I charge a lot more now than I did when I was learning the profession.

The reason for me is simple, I can do a task in a lot shorter period of time than my student can. A task that takes them hours I can do in minutes - its just because its likely that I have “been there, done that” before and they haven’t - there is no substitute for experiance.

The site also is a big deal too - if the site is coded nice, and easy to navigate through (both in the code and to the user) then I’ll charge something cheaper than say a site that is just a cluster $#% of bad code and horrible design.

You also have to know what your competition changes too - you want to make sure you get what you are worth, but also need to balance that with getting the clients so you can afford to eat. If you price yourself too low - your working yourself probably too hard - too high and your clients will start going to cheaper alternatives.

[appwrkit]

In my option you should go with hourly base rather then fixed one. It will be profiable and you can track your work time too.

Example: I should say you can charge 15$ for 1 hr it means if you worked for 5 hrs in day you can get 75$ in a day. But your work should justify your time too.

[Dani]

For one-off projects, I would agree. However, it’s industry standard to charge a flat, monthly retainer for ongoing maintenance of a small business website. Some months there may be a handful of small things to change. Some months there will be nothing to change at all. It needs to be specified in the contract that the retainer includes only changes such as A, B, C, and only up to 5 hours of work a month. Anything more, and it will be considered a larger-scale one-off project to be charged separately as such.