Pick the one that matches the stakes
Sound Check
$150/mo
For the site that is fine, probably, and nobody has checked in a while
- Uptime and error monitoring, plus a security-release watch on every module you run
- Backups verified — not assumed
- Core Web Vitals tracked, so a slowdown reaches you before it reaches a customer
- A monthly note in plain English: what changed, what is worth knowing
- No fix hours. This is the smoke detector, not the fire department.
Here is the honest part, and it is the whole tier: nobody fixes anything at this one. If something breaks you will hear about it fast and accurately, with a number attached before any work starts. If you want a person who just goes and fixes it, that is Standby at $350.
It is $150 because the machine watching your site is already watching three hundred and twenty-seven others. It does not sleep, it does not take a week off in July, and it costs me about the same whether it is watching one site or four hundred. That is why the watching is cheap and the hands are not.
Standby
$350/mo
For a site that has to stay up and cannot afford a bad Tuesday
- Security patches inside 72 hours, tested on a staging copy first — never straight at your live site
- Daily backups. Once a quarter I restore one somewhere else and confirm it is actually a site.
- Uptime and error monitoring, watched by a person who will call you
- A monthly report in plain English
- Small fixes — anything under thirty minutes — up to four a month, no quote, no ceremony
Everybody backs up. Almost nobody restores. That is the whole difference between a backup and a recovery, and it is most of what you are buying here.
On Air
$850/mo
For the site the organization actually runs on
- Everything in Standby, patches inside 48 hours
- Core Web Vitals monitoring — speed regressions caught before anyone feels them
- Accessibility regression checks on every update cycle
- Deprecated-API and module-health watch, so an upgrade never ambushes you
- A daily test transaction through your real checkout, and I hear about it before your customer does
- Three hours of my time a month, booked like a standing appointment
This is the tier most organizations land on, and it is the one with arithmetic worth doing out loud. That is CH 04, a little further down the page.
Prime Time
$1,850/mo
For the store where a broken checkout is a bad quarter
- Everything in On Air, patches inside 24 hours
- Promotion-stack integrity checked before and after every campaign
- Transactional email watched, not assumed
- A current inventory of every client-side script on your payment pages for PCI DSS 6.4.3, and tamper detection for 11.6.1
- Business-hours emergencies answered inside the hour
- Six hours a month. Additional production site, $450.
What this is not: hosting, an SEO retainer, or a marketing team. If you need those I will happily tell you who is good at them. This is the technical floor under your revenue and nothing else.
The cap is 6 sites, 6 seats open today, and a second production store under the same watch is $450 a month. The cap is arithmetic, not scarcity marketing: if three stores break in the same hour, one person can acknowledge all three and cannot fix all three, and I would rather publish that than discover it with you.
About the cheap plans
The fifty-nine-dollar plans do a lot of this with a script, and honestly the script is good at it. What a script cannot do is notice the patch broke your checkout, or look at a security release and decide not to apply it yet. That judgment call is what the rest of the money buys.
One comparison worth making out loud, because nobody else is making it: the biggest WordPress care-plan vendors introduce staging-tested updates at their top tier, around $359 a month. Here it is the floor — $350, on Standby.
Everything, line by line
The care and feeding comes first, because that is the part that keeps a bad Tuesday from ever arriving. Hours are at the bottom, where they belong — they are the smallest thing on this table and the only one anybody ever asks about first.
| What you get | Sound Check$150/mo | Standby$350/mo | On Air$850/mo | Prime Time$1,850/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Security patch window | Alerted, not applied | Inside 72 hours | Inside 48 hours | Inside 24 hours |
| Patches tested on a staging copy first | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Backups verified, not assumed | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Quarterly restore drill, somewhere other than your server | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Uptime and error monitoring | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Core Web Vitals tracked | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Accessibility regression checks each update cycle | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Deprecated-API and module-health watch | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Daily test transaction through your real checkout | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Promotion stack and transactional email checked | Not included | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Client-side script inventory for PCI DSS 6.4.3, tamper detection for 11.6.1 | Not included | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Included hands | None — nobody fixes anything | Small fixes under 30 minutes, up to four a month | Three hours a month | Six hours a month |
| Emergency response, site down | Alert, then a quote | 4 business hours | 2 business hours | 1 hour |
When something breaks
| What happened | Prime Time | On Air | Standby |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site down, checkout broken, or a live security incident | 1 hour | 2 business hours | 4 business hours |
| Broken, but the site is still up | 4 business hours | 4 business hours | 4 business hours |
| A question, a request, a small change | 1 business day | 1 business day | 1 business day |
Sound Check is not on this ladder, because it has no hands. You get the alert and a number, fast, and then you decide.
Business hours are 8 to 5 Central, Monday through Friday. There is no 24/7 here and I am not going to pretend there is — one person, one pager, and a genuine preference for sleeping. What there is: an after-hours protocol in writing, and after hours bills at the same $250 as everything else. No midnight surcharge, no promise that I am awake.
Worth knowing what you are comparing that to. Most plans in the $99 to $299 field publish an “average” response of eight to twenty-four hours. Average is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. Everything in the table above is a commitment.
Held time costs more than found time
Now the arithmetic, because you are going to do it anyway: three hours at $850 works out to more than my hourly rate of $250. That is not a mistake and it is not a markup.
You are not buying three hours. You are buying three hours that are already yours on the first of the month, plus everything above the line in that table — the patching, the monitoring, the restore drills — which runs whether you ever call or not. Reserved time costs more than time you have to go find. If all you want is hours, do not buy a plan. Call me and buy hours, at the published rate.
What the retainer actually holds
- A slot on the calendar that is yours before anyone else asks for it
- Somebody who already knows your architecture, so an emergency does not start with orientation
- Monitoring and patching that run in the background of a month where nothing happens
- The patch window in your row of the matrix, held whether or not you use a minute of your hours
About “unlimited edits”
You will see that word a lot at $179 a month, and it is not a scam — it is a staffing model. Unlimited means a rotating team handling content tasks capped at thirty minutes each, and for a lot of sites that is genuinely the right purchase. It is a real product and I would point you at one.
It just is not this. And “unlimited” has a limit too — it is whatever the vendor’s tolerance turns out to be, and you find out where it is after you have signed.
Past the cap
Capped is a floor on what is included, not a ceiling on what gets done. Past the cap it is $250 an hour, billed in fifteen-minute blocks, and the written estimate comes first — you see the number before the work starts, every time.
Also not this
Not hosting, not a redesign subscription, not content writing, not an SEO retainer. If the site needs a real project rather than a plan, that is a build, and if somebody else left it in rough shape, that is a rescue. Different work, different page, honest either way.
The questions people actually ask
What does website maintenance cost?
Here, $150 to $1,850 a month, published above with every included line. The wider market runs from $59-a-month WordPress scripts to institutional Drupal care near $16,000 a year. The difference is what is actually inside: staging-tested patches, backups somebody has restored, and a senior engineer who already knows your site before it breaks.
Do I even need a plan?
Sometimes not, and I will say so. If the site is small, rarely changes, and you have a backup you have actually restored, you may be fine paying for a Site Health Check once a year and nothing monthly. Sound Check exists for the middle case: you want somebody watching, you do not need somebody standing by.
What happens if I go past the included hours?
Past the cap it is $250 an hour, billed in fifteen-minute blocks, and you see a written estimate before the work starts. Capped is a floor on what is included, not a ceiling on what gets done. There has never been a surprise invoice here and there is not going to be one.
Is there a contract?
Month to month. Cancel with thirty days and we part friendly. You keep every report I ever sent you, and I hand off credentials, documentation and the monitoring configuration to whoever comes next, same day, no ceremony.
Do you only do Drupal?
No. Drupal is the deep end and WordPress is fluent, and the tiers are priced the same either way. If your site runs on something I would be learning on your dime, I will tell you that instead of taking the retainer.
Not sure which row you are in? A Site Health Check reads the gauges once and tells you whether a plan is worth it — including when the answer is no.
Every price Dead North charges — plans, diagnostics, builds, the hourly — sits on one page in one table: prices and plans. If your week is more specific than a price list, say so in three sentences and I will tell you which tier fits, or that you do not need one yet. That part is free and it is staying free.
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