We sell maintenance plans, so treat this article with appropriate suspicion — but the maths below is real, and for some businesses the honest answer is no, don’t buy one. Work through four questions.
Question 1: What’s an hour of your time worth?
Proper maintenance is 3–5 hours a month (updates done carefully, backups verified, monitoring reviewed, small fixes). If your time is worth R500/hour to your business, DIY maintenance “costs” R1,500–R2,500 a month in your labour — before you break something. If you genuinely enjoy the tinkering and have slack time, that number can honestly be zero.
Question 2: What does a day of downtime cost you?
Add up: direct sales lost, leads lost (× your close rate × average customer value), plus damage-control time. A store doing R60,000/month loses roughly R2,000/day down. A services firm whose site brings two R10,000 clients a month loses less per day — but a broken contact form fails silently for weeks, which is worse.
Question 3: What would an incident cost you?
Realistic South African numbers: malware cleanup R3,000–R15,000; emergency freelancer time R500–R800/hour; a rebuilt-from-nothing site (no backups) R15,000+. Multiply by an honest probability — for an unmaintained site, industry data puts a meaningful incident inside two years at better-than-coin-flip odds.
Question 4: What does the plan cost?
R499–R1,999/month depending on tier — R5,988 to R23,988 a year. Compare that to your answers above.
The honest verdicts
- Hobby site, no revenue attached: not worth it. DIY with a checklist.
- Technically confident owner with genuinely spare time: marginal. The plan buys convenience, not necessity.
- Business site generating leads or sales, owner busy: the numbers almost always favour the plan — usually by multiples, not percentages.
- E-commerce: not really a debate. Downtime and data loss are too expensive to leave unowned.
If your numbers said yes, our pricing page has the three plans. If they said no — bookmark our maintenance checklist and genuinely do it monthly. Either way, someone should own the job.