The one test that decides whether you owe ₹3,000 a year or ₹3,000 a month, real 2026 plan prices, the renewal floor almost nobody separates out for you, the AMC percentage trap — and the cases where you should not buy a maintenance plan at all.
Apply one test before you buy a maintenance plan in India: does the site run software that receives security patches, and does it take money? If the answer to both is no — a static brochure site, HTML or a builder export — keeping it alive costs ₹3,000 to ₹8,000 per YEAR, which is the domain and shared hosting and nothing else, because SSL is free through Let’s Encrypt and there is nothing on the server to patch. If the answer to either is yes — WordPress, WooCommerce, a login, a payment gateway — you need a real plan and the market rate is ₹3,000 to ₹15,000+ per month, which is ₹36,000 to ₹1,80,000 a year. The two answers differ by a factor of roughly 20×, and which one applies to you is decided by your stack, not by your budget. Everything above that floor is a maintenance plan — and a maintenance plan is a service you choose to buy, not a bill you automatically owe. The question is never “what does maintenance cost”; it is “does this particular site have anything that actually needs maintaining?” For a static site the answer is often no. For a WordPress or WooCommerce store handling live payments, the answer is yes and skipping it is how sites get defaced.
If your website is static pages with no login, no forms taking payment and no database, buy no maintenance plan at all. Renew the domain and hosting for ₹3,000–₹8,000 a year and stop. If your site runs WordPress, WooCommerce or any CMS with plugins, and especially if it takes live payments, a plan at ₹3,000–₹15,000 a month is not a service you are being upsold — it is the cost of not being defaced, because an unpatched WordPress installation is compromised on a timescale of weeks, not years. The dividing line is not the size of your business. It is whether the software on your server updates itself or has to be updated by a person.
ZoopCoder sells maintenance plans, so the honest disclosure is that the rule at the top of this page — static site, buy nothing — costs us recurring revenue every time a reader follows it. We would rather publish it than sell a plan to a five-page brochure site that has nothing on it to maintain.
You will be quoted an annual maintenance contract at 15% to 20% of the original build cost, presented as an industry norm. It is not one. That convention comes from enterprise software licensing, where the vendor is genuinely funding an ongoing engineering roadmap. Applied to a website it produces an absurd result: two sites needing identical monthly work — the same plugin updates, the same backups, the same uptime checks — are billed ₹7,500 and ₹75,000 a year purely because one cost ₹50,000 to build and the other ₹5,00,000. Maintenance cost tracks what has to be maintained, never what was once paid. Ask any AMC quote to be restated as a list of tasks and hours per month, and compare that instead.
Two tax lines apply here too. A maintenance plan from a GST-registered agency carries 18% GST, reclaimable if you are registered and a real cost if you are not — on a ₹1,20,000 annual plan that is ₹21,600 either recovered or lost. And under section 43B(h) of the Income Tax Act, if your provider is a registered micro or small enterprise, you must actually pay them within 45 days to claim the expense as a deduction in that financial year; pay late and the deduction moves to the year you actually pay. Most small Indian agencies, including this one, are MSME-registered, so the clause applies to a very large share of maintenance invoices in this country.
Start here, because almost no maintenance quote in India separates these two things for you — and you cannot tell whether a quote is fair until you know which part is the unavoidable renewal and which part is the service. This is the renewal floor: what it costs to keep the lights on, with no plan of any kind.
| Item | Typical cost per year | Do you actually need it? |
|---|---|---|
| Domain renewal (.com / .in) | ₹800 – ₹1,500 | Yes, always. .in is usually the cheaper of the two |
| Shared hosting | ₹2,000 – ₹6,000 | Enough for a brochure or small WordPress site. Watch the renewal rate, not the first-year offer |
| VPS / cloud hosting | ₹6,000 – ₹30,000 | Only for custom web apps, real traffic, or a store with live orders |
| SSL certificate | ₹0 | Free via Let’s Encrypt, auto-renewed by every serious host. Never pay for a basic certificate |
| Business email | ₹0 – ₹2,000 / user | Optional. Most hosts include basic mailboxes; paid suites are a convenience, not a requirement |
| Floor — small business site | ₹3,000 – ₹8,000 / year | Domain + shared hosting. That is the whole bill |
| Floor — custom app on a VPS | ₹7,000 – ₹32,000 / year | Domain + a real server |
Domain, hosting and email figures are typical Indian market rates at the time of writing, given as ranges you should verify with each vendor — they are not ZoopCoder prices and we do not resell them. The maintenance figures below are ZoopCoder’s published plans.
These are the actual plans on our pricing page, not an illustrative example. Note the first row: every ZoopCoder project includes 30 days of post-launch support free — bug fixes, minor adjustments and technical assistance — so you are not paying a retainer during the month you are most likely to need one. That is also why the year-one column multiplies by 11 months rather than 12.
| Plan | Per month | Year one (11 mo) | What you get | Right for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Post-launch support | ₹0 (first 30 days) | — | Bug fixes, minor adjustments, technical assistance | Included with every project, automatically |
| Basic | ₹3,000 | ₹33,000 | Security updates, bug fixes, limited content updates, email support, monthly backups | Brochure sites, small WordPress sites |
| Professional | ₹8,000 | ₹88,000 | Everything in Basic, plus priority support, performance monitoring, minor feature additions, weekly backups | E-commerce, lead-generating sites, anything with live orders |
| Enterprise | ₹15,000+ | ₹1,65,000+ | Everything in Professional, plus a dedicated account manager, feature development hours, 24/7 support, custom SLA | SaaS, CRM, ERP, business-critical platforms |
Add the floor to the plan and you get the real number. A small WordPress site on Basic costs about ₹39,000 in year one (₹33,000 plan + ~₹6,000 renewals) and about ₹42,000 a year after that. A busy store on Professional is about ₹95,000 in year one. A SaaS on Enterprise starts near ₹1,90,000 a year. Those are the numbers to budget — not the plan price on its own.
Want that number for your actual site, not a band?
Send us the URL. We will tell you which of these three plans it needs and why, and if the honest answer is that it needs none of them, we will say that instead. Reply on WhatsApp, within one working day.
Published maintenance rates across Indian agencies in 2026 run from roughly ₹1,500 per month for a basic site to ₹50,000+ for enterprise platforms. Here is where our plans sit inside that market, stated plainly, including the row where the market floor undercuts us.
| Site type | Indian market range / month | ZoopCoder plan | Honest read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Static brochure site | ₹1,500 – ₹5,000 | Basic ₹3,000 | You may need no plan at all — see the next section |
| WordPress site | ₹5,000 – ₹10,000 | Basic – Professional ₹3,000–₹8,000 | Genuinely needed. Plugin and core updates are a live security exposure |
| E-commerce store | ₹10,000 – ₹20,000 | Professional ₹8,000 | Money moves through it. Do not run this one bare |
| Enterprise / custom app | ₹25,000 – ₹50,000+ | Enterprise ₹15,000+ | The “+” is real — scope sets the number, and an SLA costs what it costs |
Market ranges are compiled from publicly published 2026 rate cards of Indian web agencies. They move, and any single quote can sit outside them for good reasons.
We sell maintenance plans, so read this section with that in mind — and then hold us to it. A maintenance plan is not mandatory, and an agency that tells you every site needs one is selling, not advising. Skip the plan if all of these are true:
In that case, renew the domain and hosting for ₹3,000–₹8,000 a year and buy ad-hoc support hours when you need them. Four small changes a year bought as hours will almost always cost less than ₹36,000 of retainer, and you will not have paid twelve months for a site that needed attention twice.
Buy the plan if any of these are true, because here the maths flips hard:
The dividing line is not the size of your business or what you paid to build the thing. It is whether the site has moving parts, and whether money flows through it.
Many Indian agencies quote an annual maintenance contract as a percentage of your build cost, commonly 15–20% a year. It sounds principled. It is the wrong shape, and it is worth understanding why before you sign one, because it prices your maintenance off a number from the past instead of off the work involved.
Maintenance effort is driven by three things: how often the site changes, how much of it is custom code, and how much traffic and risk it carries. Your build price is none of those. It is what you paid once, years ago, for something that may since have become busier or quieter. The percentage rule therefore produces two predictable errors in opposite directions:
| Scenario | Build cost | AMC at 18% | What the work is really worth | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expensive custom site, barely changes | ₹5,00,000 | ₹90,000 / year | Renewals + a few hours — well under ₹33,000 | You overpay, every year, forever |
| Cheap build that became a busy store | ₹40,000 | ₹7,200 / year | Live orders, monitoring, fast response — Professional territory | You are underserved and will not be told |
Look at the second row for a moment, because it is the dangerous one. ₹7,200 a year is roughly ₹600 a month. Nobody monitors a live store for ₹600 a month. What you have bought is the word maintenance, and you will discover what it did not include on the day something breaks. That is why ZoopCoder prices maintenance as flat monthly plans tied to what the site actually needs, and why a percentage quote should make you ask what specific work it buys.
If you are maintaining a mobile app rather than a website, the monthly plan bands are the same — but two extra costs apply, and one of them has teeth.
| Cost | Amount | What happens if you stop paying |
|---|---|---|
| Google Play Console | $25 one-time (~₹2,200) | Nothing — there is no renewal. Pay once, ever |
| Apple Developer Program | $99 per year (~₹8,700) | Your app is removed from the App Store. This one is not optional if you want to stay listed |
There is also a cost that never appears on a quote: forced platform work. Google and Apple raise their minimum SDK, privacy and permission requirements on their own schedule, not yours. An app left untouched for two years will eventually fail a store requirement and stop being installable — even though nothing about it broke and you changed nothing. A website left alone mostly just keeps working. An app decays on someone else’s calendar, and that is the strongest argument for keeping an app on a plan even when it feels finished.
Rupee figures are approximate and move with the exchange rate; the developer fees themselves are set in US dollars. Verify current fees with Google and Apple directly.
Almost every quote you receive states a monthly plan price and stops there, which is why so many Indian businesses budget a maintenance number and then get a second bill they did not plan for. Your real annual maintenance charge is the plan plus the renewal floor plus 18% GST. Below is that arithmetic done for you, for the four site types that cover most of the market. Read the last column first — it is the number that actually leaves your bank account.
| Site type | Plan needed | Plan / year | Renewal floor / year | GST @ 18% on the plan | All-in charge / year | All-in / month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Static brochure site HTML, builder export, no CMS, no payments | None | ₹0 | ₹3,000 – ₹8,000 | ₹0 | ₹3,000 – ₹8,000 | ₹250 – ₹670 |
| Small WordPress site CMS, contact forms, a handful of plugins | Basic ₹3,000/mo | ₹36,000 | ₹3,000 – ₹8,000 | ₹6,480 | ₹45,480 – ₹50,480 | ₹3,790 – ₹4,207 |
| WooCommerce / e-commerce store Live orders, payment gateway, customer accounts | Professional ₹8,000/mo | ₹96,000 | ₹7,000 – ₹32,000 | ₹17,280 | ₹1,20,280 – ₹1,45,280 | ₹10,023 – ₹12,107 |
| SaaS / CRM / custom platform Business-critical, custom code, real traffic | Enterprise ₹15,000+/mo | ₹1,80,000+ | ₹7,000 – ₹32,000 | ₹32,400+ | ₹2,19,400+ | ₹18,283+ |
Plan prices are ZoopCoder’s published rates and are shown here at 12 months so the annual charge is comparable to any other quote; in a real first year you pay 11, because the first 30 days of post-launch support are included free with every project. Renewal-floor figures are typical Indian market rates you should verify with your own domain and hosting vendors — they are not ZoopCoder charges and we do not resell them. GST is charged on the maintenance service and is fully reclaimable as input credit if your business is GST-registered.
If you are not GST-registered, the 18% is a real, unrecoverable cost, and it is the line most maintenance comparisons in India quietly leave out. On a ₹8,000-a-month Professional plan that is ₹17,280 a year of pure tax — more than the entire annual charge for a static brochure site. So compare quotes GST-inclusive or GST-exclusive, but never one against the other. And if a vendor quotes you a single annual “AMC” figure with no split at all, ask them to break it into these three lines before you sign, because a number you cannot decompose is a number you cannot negotiate.
A WordPress site costs more to keep alive than the plan price suggests, and the reason is almost never the agency’s fee. It is that a typical Indian small-business WordPress build sits on three to six paid annual licences — a page builder, a security plugin, a backup plugin, a forms plugin, sometimes a premium theme — and those licences renew in your name, in dollars, on dates nobody wrote down. Budget ₹12,000 to ₹40,000 a year in third-party licences on top of the maintenance plan and the hosting for a normal WordPress site, and more for WooCommerce.
| Recurring item | Typical list price / year | Can you skip it? |
|---|---|---|
| Page builder (Elementor Pro, Divi, WPBakery class) | ₹5,000 – ₹9,000 | Only if you never edit layouts. Let it lapse and the site keeps rendering, but you stop getting security fixes for the plugin that touches every page |
| Premium theme or theme framework | ₹4,000 – ₹7,000 | Often yes after year one, if the theme is stable and you are not chasing new features |
| Security / firewall plugin (premium tier) | ₹0 – ₹13,000 | Yes on a low-risk site — the free tiers are genuinely usable. No if the site takes payments |
| Backup plugin (premium tier + off-site storage) | ₹0 – ₹6,500 | Yes if your host or your maintenance plan already takes off-server backups. Do not pay twice for the same backup |
| Forms / CRM / SEO plugin (premium tier) | ₹0 – ₹9,000 | Usually yes. The free tiers of the mainstream forms and SEO plugins cover a brochure site completely |
| WooCommerce paid extensions (subscriptions, bookings, shipping) | ₹8,000 – ₹25,000+ each | No, if your business model depends on the extension. This is the line that makes store maintenance genuinely expensive |
| Managed WordPress hosting (instead of shared) | ₹6,000 – ₹25,000 | Optional. It buys staging, automatic core updates and better support — and it genuinely reduces how much maintenance labour you need to buy |
| Realistic licence total — small WordPress site | ₹12,000 – ₹40,000 / year | On top of the plan and the hosting, not inside them |
These are third-party vendor list prices, given as bands and converted from USD at roughly ₹88 to the dollar. They change often and vary by the number of sites a licence covers — check the current price on each vendor’s own site before you budget. None of these are ZoopCoder charges and we do not resell plugin licences or take a margin on them.
So the honest all-in number for a small WordPress site in India in 2026 is roughly ₹57,000 to ₹90,000 a year — a ₹3,000/month plan, ₹3,000–₹8,000 of domain and hosting, ₹12,000–₹40,000 of plugin and theme licences, and 18% GST on the service portion. If someone has quoted you ₹36,000 flat, they have quoted the labour and left the software licences on your desk. That is not necessarily dishonest — the licences genuinely should be in your name — but you should know before, not after.
Every paid plugin you remove saves you the licence fee and reduces the maintenance labour, because each plugin is an independent update stream and an independent way for the site to break. A WordPress site running eight plugins is meaningfully cheaper to maintain than the same site running twenty-five, and the difference is not marginal — plugin conflicts after updates are the single most common reason a maintenance retainer overruns its hours in a given month. Before you renew anything, list every paid licence, open the site with that plugin deactivated on staging, and see whether anything a customer can see actually changes. On most Indian small-business WordPress sites, at least one paid licence a year fails that test.
One more thing that is specific to WordPress and costs nothing to fix: turn on automatic background updates for minor core releases and leave them on. WordPress ships security patches as minor releases and they are designed to be safe to auto-apply; the ones that genuinely need a human are major version jumps and plugin updates. Sites that disable all automatic updates “to be safe” are the ones that end up three security releases behind, and that is a self-inflicted maintenance cost, not a real one.
A website maintenance package in India in 2026 costs ₹3,000 to ₹15,000+ a month, and across almost every Indian agency the tiers are built from the same five ingredients: security and CMS updates, bug fixes, backups, a capped amount of content editing, and a support response time. What separates a ₹3,000 package from a ₹15,000 one is not more of those five — it is backup frequency, whether anyone is watching the site when it breaks, and whether development hours are included at all. Below is ZoopCoder’s three published packages set out line by line, including the four lines that no maintenance package covers and that you will be billed for separately no matter who you hire.
| Line item | Basic ₹3,000/mo | Professional ₹8,000/mo | Enterprise ₹15,000+/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Security & CMS/plugin updates | Included | Included | Included |
| Bug fixes on existing features | Included | Included | Included |
| Backups | Monthly | Weekly | Weekly, frequency set by your SLA |
| Content updates (text, images, prices) | Limited | Limited | Limited, plus development hours |
| Support channel | Email support | Priority support | 24/7 + dedicated account manager |
| Uptime & performance monitoring | Not included | Included | Included |
| Minor feature additions | Not included | Included | Included |
| Budgeted feature development hours | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Written SLA | Not included | Not included | Custom SLA |
| Domain & hosting renewals | In no package. Billed by your registrar and host: ₹3,000 – ₹32,000 a year | ||
| Plugin, theme & extension licences | In no package. Renewed in your own name: ₹12,000 – ₹40,000 a year on a typical WordPress build | ||
| Redesigns and new modules | In no package. Quoted as a separate project — a maintenance retainer is not a build budget | ||
| 18% GST on the service | Added on top of every plan price above. Reclaimable as input credit only if you are GST-registered | ||
Two things to check on any Indian maintenance package before you compare prices. First, “unlimited content updates” is never unlimited — it is capped by a fair-use clause somewhere in the contract, so ask for the cap in hours or requests per month and compare that number, not the adjective. Second, the ₹1,500 – ₹2,000 per month packages advertised at the bottom of the Indian market are almost always update-only: someone applies plugin updates on a schedule and nobody is monitoring, testing or on call when the site goes down at 9pm on a Saturday. For a static brochure site that is entirely reasonable and you may not need even that — for a store taking live orders it is a false economy, because the cheap package does not include the one thing you are actually buying, which is somebody responsible.
A monthly website maintenance fee is, underneath, an hours purchase, and at the ₹600 to ₹1,200 per hour that competent Indian agencies charge for maintenance labour in 2026, a ₹3,000 a month retainer is worth roughly 2.5 to 5 hours of someone’s attention and a ₹8,000 retainer roughly 7 to 13 hours. That single conversion is the fastest way to judge any monthly quote in this country, because a normal WordPress site genuinely needs about 2 to 3 hours a month of real work — core and plugin updates, a backup you actually test, a look at the uptime and security log — and any fee that does not buy at least that is not being done, while any fee far above it is buying availability and response time rather than labour. Run the arithmetic before you compare two quotes, not after.
| Monthly fee | Labour it is worth at ₹600–₹1,200/hr | What that realistically covers | Honest verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under ₹1,000 | Under 1 hour | An automated plugin-update job and a scheduled backup. Nobody is looking at the site. | This is a hosting add-on, not maintenance. Fine if you know that is what you bought. |
| ₹1,500 – ₹2,500 | 1.5 – 4 hours | Update-only. Patches get applied and backups run, but nothing is investigated between tickets and content edits are charged separately. | Legitimate for a small static-ish site. It is not a plan that will catch a problem for you. |
| ₹3,000 (ZoopCoder Basic) | 2.5 – 5 hours | Security and CMS updates, bug fixes on existing features, limited content updates, monthly backups, email support. | The realistic floor for a WordPress site that has to stay patched. |
| ₹8,000 (ZoopCoder Professional) | 7 – 13 hours | Everything above, plus performance monitoring, weekly backups, priority response and minor feature additions. | Where a store with live orders or a lead-generating site belongs. |
| ₹15,000+ (ZoopCoder Enterprise) | 12 – 25+ hours | A dedicated account manager, budgeted feature-development hours, 24/7 support and a custom SLA. | You are buying a standing share of a team, not a maintenance chore list. |
The ₹600–₹1,200/hour figure is a typical Indian agency rate for maintenance work at the time of writing, given so you can sanity-check any quote — it is not a ZoopCoder published rate, and our plans are sold as plans, not as blocks of hours. The plan prices are our real published prices. Add the renewal floor on top of any row above to get the number you will actually pay.
There is no website maintenance cost calculator that can price your site without knowing what is on it. There is, however, an arithmetic you can do on the back of the quote itself, in about two minutes:
For a 5 to 15 page Indian small-business site the honest answer is ₹0 or about ₹3,000 a month, and almost nothing in between. If the site is static pages with no login and no payments, pay nothing and renew the domain and hosting at ₹3,000–₹8,000 a year. If it runs WordPress, the ₹3,000/month tier is the point at which the updates are genuinely someone’s job. A small business paying more than about ₹5,000 a month for a brochure site with no store, no logins and no live orders is buying capacity it will not use, and should either move down a tier or convert the retainer into ad-hoc hours bought when something actually needs doing — four small changes a year purchased as hours will nearly always cost less than ₹36,000 of retainer. And note the 18% GST line: a ₹3,000 plan is ₹3,540 out of the bank account, reclaimable only if you are GST-registered.
Most maintenance disputes in India are not about price. They are about an undefined phrase in a one-line quote. Before you pay anyone — us included — get these three numbers written down:
And one more, which matters more than all three: make sure you own the code, the domain and the hosting account. ZoopCoder hands over complete ownership of the source code, the database and all project files with technical documentation as part of the quoted price. If you can leave, a maintenance plan is a service you are choosing. If you cannot, it is not a plan — it is rent on something you already bought. Check which one you are being offered before you compare prices, because that single fact determines whether the price means anything at all.
First ask whether the site runs patchable software and whether it takes money. If neither, ₹3,000–₹8,000 a YEAR covers it — domain and hosting, nothing else. If either, ₹3,000 to ₹15,000+ per month in 2026, which is ₹36,000 to ₹1,80,000 a year. ZoopCoder publishes three plans: Basic ₹3,000/month (security updates, bug fixes, limited content updates, email support, monthly backups), Professional ₹8,000/month (adds priority support, performance monitoring, minor feature additions, weekly backups) and Enterprise ₹15,000+/month (adds a dedicated account manager, feature development hours, 24/7 support, a custom SLA). Across the wider Indian market the range runs from about ₹1,500/month for a basic brochure site to ₹50,000+ for enterprise platforms.
₹3,000 to ₹8,000 per year for a small business website. That is the true floor and it is only two things: a domain renewal (~₹800–₹1,500/year) and shared hosting (~₹2,000–₹6,000/year). SSL is free via Let’s Encrypt. A custom web application on a VPS raises the floor to ~₹7,000–₹32,000/year because it needs a real server. Everything above the floor is a maintenance plan — a service you choose to buy, not a bill you automatically owe.
Not always, and any agency that says it is mandatory for every site is selling rather than advising. A static brochure site with no logins, no payments and no database has almost nothing to maintain. A WordPress or WooCommerce site is the opposite — plugin and core updates are a continuous security exposure, and an unpatched install is the most common way Indian small-business sites get defaced. Anything that takes payments, stores customer data, or carries your revenue should be on a plan. If your site changes a few times a year, buy ad-hoc support hours instead of a retainer.
It is common in India, but it is the wrong shape: it prices maintenance off a number from the past rather than off the work involved. Effort is driven by change rate, custom code, traffic and risk — none of which is your build price. The rule fails in both directions: on an expensive build that never changes you overpay for years; on a cheap build that became a busy transactional site you are underserved. A flat plan matched to the actual workload is more honest, which is why we price maintenance as flat monthly plans rather than a percentage of what you already paid.
At minimum: security updates, bug fixes, and backups you can actually restore from. Beyond that, plans add content updates, uptime and performance monitoring, and a defined response time. Get three things in writing before signing: backup frequency and storage location, guaranteed response time, and exactly what “limited content updates” means in hours or requests per month — that undefined phrase is where most maintenance disputes start. ZoopCoder includes 30 days of post-launch support free with every project, so you do not pay a retainer during the month you are most likely to need one.
The same ₹3,000–₹15,000+/month band, plus two costs a website does not carry. A Google Play Console account is a one-time $25 developer fee (~₹2,200) with no renewal. The Apple Developer Program is $99/year (~₹8,700) and it is a hard renewal — stop paying and your app is removed from the App Store. Apps also face forced work: Google and Apple raise minimum SDK and privacy requirements on their own schedule, so an app left untouched for two years will eventually stop being installable even though nothing about it broke.
All-in, including GST and renewals: about ₹3,000–₹8,000 a year for a static brochure site (no plan at all), ₹45,000–₹50,000 for a small WordPress site on a ₹3,000/month plan, ₹1,20,000–₹1,45,000 for a WooCommerce store on a ₹8,000/month plan, and ₹2,19,000+ for a SaaS or CRM platform on Enterprise. Those figures are plan + domain and hosting renewals + 18% GST on the service. Most quotes state only the plan, so the number you are shown is typically 20–35% below what you will actually pay across the year.
Roughly ₹57,000 to ₹90,000 a year all-in for a small business WordPress site. That is a ₹3,000/month maintenance plan, ₹3,000–₹8,000 of domain and hosting, ₹12,000–₹40,000 of third-party plugin and theme licences that renew in your name in dollars, and 18% GST on the service portion. The licence line is the one almost every quote leaves out. A WooCommerce store is higher again, because paid Woo extensions run ₹8,000–₹25,000+ each per year. The cheapest lever is not a cheaper agency — it is running fewer paid plugins, which cuts the licence bill and the labour at the same time.
Five things, in every serious package at every price: security and CMS/plugin updates, bug fixes on existing features, backups, a capped amount of content editing, and a defined support response time. What the higher tiers add is backup frequency, uptime and performance monitoring, minor feature additions, budgeted development hours, and a written SLA. Four costs are in no maintenance package anywhere in India and you will pay them separately regardless of vendor: domain and hosting renewals (₹3,000–₹32,000 a year), third-party plugin, theme and extension licences (₹12,000–₹40,000 a year on a typical WordPress build), redesigns or new modules, which are quoted as projects, and 18% GST on the service. If a package quote does not name all five inclusions and exclude those four explicitly, it is not comparable to any other quote.
Reduce both quotes to four numbers before you look at the price. One: the content-update cap expressed in hours or requests per month — “unlimited” is always capped by a fair-use clause, so ask for the number. Two: backup frequency and where the backups are stored, because a backup you cannot restore from is not a backup. Three: the guaranteed response time, and whether it applies outside business hours. Four: the all-in annual figure — the plan × 12, plus renewals, plus licences, plus 18% GST — which typically runs 20–35% above the monthly price both agencies are advertising. Two plans at ₹5,000 and ₹8,000 a month are not comparable until you know whether the cheaper one includes monitoring; if it does not, you are comparing a scheduled update script against somebody who answers the phone.
₹3,000 to ₹8,000 a month for almost every ordinary Indian business website, and ₹0 for a genuinely static one. Test any quote by dividing it by the ₹600–₹1,200 hourly rate Indian agencies charge for maintenance labour: a normal WordPress site needs about 2 to 3 hours a month of real work, so a fee worth less than that is not buying the work, and a fee worth far more is buying availability and response time rather than labour. Take the domain and hosting (roughly ₹250–₹700 a month) out of the quote first — you pay that with no plan at all.
Roughly ₹600 to ₹1,200 per hour from a competent agency in 2026, and about ₹300 to ₹800 from an individual freelancer. Ad-hoc hours are the cheaper structure for any site that changes only a few times a year: four small changes bought as hours will almost always cost less than a ₹3,000/month retainer, which is ₹36,000 a year. A retainer wins when you need a guaranteed response time, or when the site runs software that must be patched whether or not you asked for anything that month.
₹0 or about ₹3,000 a month, and almost nothing in between. A 5 to 15 page static brochure site needs no plan — renew the domain and hosting for ₹3,000–₹8,000 a YEAR and stop. A small business site on WordPress needs the ₹3,000/month tier, which is where patching becomes someone’s job. Above roughly ₹5,000 a month, a brochure site with no store, no logins and no live orders is paying for capacity it will not use.
No — and if you cannot leave, that is the real problem, not the price. You should own your source code, your domain registrar account and your hosting account outright, so you can move to any other developer at any time. ZoopCoder hands over complete ownership of the source code, the database and all project files with documentation as part of the quoted price. Check this before buying any maintenance plan in India: an agency that holds the code, registers the domain in its own name, or hosts the site only on its own account is not selling maintenance — it is selling you the ability to keep using something you already paid for.
Tell us what the site runs on and how often it really changes. We quote a plan against your true update volume — or tell you that you need support hours instead of a monthly plan, which is often the cheaper honest answer. Reply in 24–48 hours.
Tell us what the site does and how often it changes. If the honest answer is that you do not need a plan, we will say so — and quote you support hours instead.