What Craft CMS Maintenance Costs in 2026

The two pricing models

Hourly / ad hoc. You call when something breaks and pay for the time. Rates for Craft-competent developers generally run somewhere between $100 and $200 an hour depending on the market and the depth of expertise.

The trap isn’t the rate, it’s the behavior it creates. When every request costs money, you stop making requests. Updates get deferred, small fixes pile up, and the site decays until the deferred work becomes one large frightening project. We often take over sites that were technically “on hourly support” and hadn’t had an update in eighteen months.

Fixed monthly retainer. You pay the same amount every month whether you use it or not, and it covers the proactive work — updates, backups, monitoring — plus some volume of support requests.

The upside is behavioral as much as financial: the updates happen, because they’re the provider’s obligation rather than your purchase decision. And you stop weighing whether a ten-minute fix is worth the invoice.

What the market charges

We looked at the maintenance pricing that Craft agencies and freelancers publish, in the US and the UK, in October 2026. Most providers don’t publish prices at all, so treat these as ranges, not quotes. They fall into three bands:

Hourly Craft work, outside a plan, generally runs $100 to $200 an hour. In the UK, senior freelance Craft developers quote about £400 to £700 a day and specialist agencies about £1,000 to £1,500, which lands in the same place.

A few costs usually sit outside those numbers:

• The Craft license renewal. $99 a year for Team or Pro, at Craft’s published prices. It’s what lets you receive updates.
• Commercial plugin renewals. Each paid plugin has its own yearly renewal. A typical business site has a handful.
• Hosting, unless the plan includes it. Managed Craft hosting starts around $20 a month for a small site and climbs with traffic.
• Major version upgrades, such as Craft 4 to 5, which nearly everyone prices as a separate project.

One thing that looks like maintenance and isn’t: Craft’s own Developer Support ($75 a month for the Pro tier) gets your developer faster answers from the Craft team. Craft says plainly that it doesn’t replace your developer or agency.

A first-year example

Here’s how the two models compare for a common case: a 30-page Craft Pro site with forms that feed a CRM, on managed hosting. The rate and hours are assumptions, but they’re typical.

Hourly, at $150 an hour:

Care plan at $500 a month, with hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, and small changes included: about $6,000.

Two things stand out. First, hourly only looks cheaper if you leave out the updates, and leaving out the updates is how sites end up unpatched. Second, the emergency is the line you can’t predict. On hourly it’s an invoice; on a plan it’s already paid for. Add the Craft and plugin renewals to either column; they’re the same either way.

What a retainer should include

If someone quotes you a monthly rate, this is the list to check it against.

If a plan doesn’t cover Craft and plugin updates, it isn’t maintenance. It’s hosting with a nicer invoice.

What moves the price

Four variables explain most of the spread between quotes:

Site complexity. A twelve-page brochure site and a Craft Commerce store with ERP integration are not the same maintenance job, and no honest provider prices them the same.

Integrations. Every external API is something that can change underneath you. A site wired into Salesforce, a marketing platform, and a payment processor needs someone watching three moving targets.

Response time. A four-hour guarantee costs more than a twenty-four-hour one, because it requires staffing to deliver it. This is the variable most worth thinking about: if your site takes orders, a day of downtime is expensive; if it’s a brochure, it isn’t.

Included development time. Some plans bundle a monthly block of hours for larger changes. That’s usually better value than paying hourly for the same work, but only if you’ll use it.

How to compare quotes fairly

Ask every provider the same five questions:

1. Which specific things do you update, and how often?
2. When did you last restore a client backup, and how long did it take?
3. What counts as a “small change,” and what’s the cutoff?
4. What’s your response time, and what happens if you miss it?
5. If I leave, what do I get — code, license, database, hosting access?

That last one is the tell. A provider who owns your license and hosting in their name has made leaving expensive on purpose.

Our pricing

We sell fixed monthly retainers in three tiers, and we don’t publish per-plan prices — not to be coy, but because the right tier depends on the answers to the questions above, and people talk themselves out of the correct plan by reading a number without the context. Every conversation ends with a written proposal and a price, usually within a business day.

What’s the same across all three: hosting, version control, offsite monitored backups, uptime monitoring, and Craft and plugin updates. What changes as you move up is how often your site changes:

• Starter includes one maintenance request a month, for a site your team mostly handles itself.
• Essential includes four a month, plus integration upkeep and Burrow, our reporting dashboard, so you can see what we did and when.
• Pro includes unlimited requests, plus a web application firewall and CDN.

The one number worth stating plainly: a maintenance request is any task under thirty minutes, and about 95% of the support requests we receive fall inside that window. On Pro, unlimited genuinely means unlimited.

See what’s in each plan, or if your site is already behind and you’re not sure what shape it’s in, start with an audit instead. It’s the first step whenever we take over your Craft site.