How much does website, portal or system maintenance cost per month?

What does website maintenance cost? Market prices

In October 2026, RankPilot compared the maintenance prices of 88 Dutch providers. The median was €30 a month, with the middle half between €20 and €43. Most agency overviews quote a range of €20 to €150, with hourly work at €60 to €120.

Check what each package leaves out. In the same study, 48 of the 88 providers did not make clear whether hosting was included, and 51 did not say whether prices included VAT. A cheap package with separate hosting and an hourly bill for every change is often the most expensive one after a year.

What belongs in a maintenance contract?

Good maintenance is more than pressing the update button. These items belong in it, or you should know they are missing:

1. Hosting and infrastructure. Where does your site run, who manages the server, and is it inside the EU?
2. Updates, tested. Updating software, frameworks and any plugins, then checking that forms and payments still work.
3. Backups you can restore. How often, how long they are kept, and has a restore ever been tested?
4. Monitoring. An alert when the site is down or errors occur, before a customer notices.
5. Security. An SSL certificate, security updates and protection against abuse of forms and login pages.
6. Recovery when things go wrong. Who fixes an outage or a hack, how fast, and does it cost extra? Only 4 of the 88 providers in the RankPilot study explicitly mentioned hack recovery.
7. Support and small changes. How quickly do you get an answer, and how many small edits are included?

What happens if you do nothing?

A website nobody looks after doesn't break all at once. It ages quietly. Forms stop sending without anyone noticing, a certificate expires, the site slows down, and security holes pile up.

That last part moves faster than most business owners expect. Security company Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 42 percent more than the year before. 91 percent were in plugins. For 46 percent, the developer had no fix ready when the issue went public. And for the most heavily exploited vulnerabilities, the median time between disclosure and the first attacks was just five hours.

So a site left unpatched for months isn't slightly behind. It is open to attacks that are already automated.

Maintaining a portal, CRM or system: what's different?

Almost every price overview online is about WordPress websites. But more and more businesses run a system behind their site: a client portal, a booking module, a CRM or an operations portal for the team. Maintaining those involves more:

• Data. A database with customer and business records needs backups that can restore to an exact point in time, not just a copy of the files.
• Access rights. Who can see what must still be right after every change. A customer must never be able to reach another customer's data.
• Integrations. Email, payments, calendars and accounting software change their technology. An integration that works today can stop after the other party updates.
• Users. When a team works in the system all day, an outage costs working time straight away. That calls for faster monitoring and clear response times.
• GDPR. If your supplier processes personal data on your behalf, you need a data processing agreement. A data breach has to be reported to the Dutch Data Protection Authority within 72 hours, so you want to know who notices it and who you call.

That's why maintaining a system costs more than maintaining a brochure website. Not because there are more updates, but because more is at stake.

WordPress or custom: is maintenance different?

With WordPress, maintenance is mostly about the core, the theme and the plugins. Every plugin is someone else's code, with its own update cycle and its own vulnerabilities. More plugins means more maintenance.

A custom site or system has no stack of third-party plugins, so there are fewer places where things can go wrong. But custom software also runs on frameworks and libraries that get updates. A custom system left alone for years ages just the same. The difference is who keeps it current: with custom work, that's the team that knows the code.

How to compare maintenance quotes

Put quotes side by side with these questions:

• Is hosting included, and is the price including or excluding VAT?
• How often are backups made, how long are they kept, and who restores them?
• Is recovery after an outage or hack included, or billed as extra work?
• How quickly does the supplier respond, and on which days?
• How many small changes or hours are included, and what does an extra hour cost?
• What is the notice period, and what do you take with you when you leave?

That last question is often forgotten. Read switching to another web developer for what is yours and how to leave without damage.

Editing it yourself cuts maintenance costs

A large share of the hours in maintenance packages goes to small changes: a line of text, a photo, a new price. Those don't need to go through the developer if you can make them yourself.

At Aimée Experience, the owner edits copy, photos, services and rates herself. She previews changes as a draft and restores earlier versions in one click. The price table and FAQ update automatically with the prices. Maintenance there is about the technology underneath, not every text change.

What does maintenance cost at Vorteca?

At Vorteca, Vorteca Core comes with every project: hosting, monitoring, security and technical maintenance. The price scales with what is running.

If you want more than the technical foundation, there are three optional upgrades. Care Plus (€99/mo) adds small content edits, small bug fixes and faster support. Growth Care (€199/mo) adds monthly optimisation and small further development. Partner Care (€349/mo) is for environments that matter to daily operations, with a roadmap and priority.

Vorteca Core can be cancelled monthly, effective at the end of a calendar month. All packages are on the pricing page. Want to know how your current site is doing first? Run the free website scan.